: The reinstatement of Zero Hour in the Rajya Sabha by the present chairman this week, after consulting all parties, is a lot more crucial than it might appear at first glance.
In Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, Charles Seife has dwelt on the uniqueness and significance of ‘zero’, variously referred to as the ‘shoonya’ and ‘cipher’. He has demonstrated its connection with the broader philosophies of the civilisations where it took root. Especially in India, ‘zero’ has always had an intimate lock-in with the notion of infinity — nothingness being a close cousin of the infinite. The hope remains that the apparent nothingness of the zero (as in Zero Hour) will again open up infinite possibilities of debate, engagement and discussion among the representatives of Indian citizens and states, often kept agonisingly apart, due to the pressures of party (read partisan) politics.
Zero Hour is not a part of parliamentary rules, but it has been in place since the days of the chairmanship of S. Radhakrishnan. The ’60s in India saw the emergence of this concept, when parliamentarians, immediately on completion of Question Hour, started raising issues which upset or annoyed them, often without the permission of the chair. It was decided, after much debate, to institutionalise it as a convention, and as a designated hour. It refers to the one hour, just after Question Hour (which is over at noon) and before the lunch break, meant to enable parliamentarians to take up urgent issues of public importance, but after having served notice on them by late morning. It is a time when notices can range from issues as diverse as the ill-treatment of the Indian foreign minister by the Pakistan high commissioner to the Hubli incident or to the reported utterances of the Shiv Sena chief in the ’90s.
Predictably, as with all such things — despite the parliamentary affairs minister and the secretariat sending off the relevant proceedings of Question Hour to the concerned ministries to draw their attention to them and apprise them of the sentiment of the House — this was initially thought not to have any tangible utility. Discussed at length at Presiding Officers Conferences in Delhi and Goa in the late ’60s, Zero Hour was reportedly referred to by some as the ‘mad hour’, ‘a waste of public money’ and ‘an unwanted thing’.
