Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee looked ready to blow the House down. Jowls aquiver with suppressed wrath, he reduced Minister of State for Heavy Industry Mohammed Taslimuddin to an apologetic jelly on the last day of the budget session. The blasé Laloo Prasad Yadav fared no better; unnerved by that gimlet gaze, he twice proceeded to "lay table in House", when told to present his paper.

GOODBYE IDEOLOGY: Chatterjee claims that he doesn't let his views influence his decisions

Irascible, Somnathda is determined to leave his mark in Parliament-if not in the House, then outside it. He has made significant policy changes towards making the functioning of Parliament more transparent. He may be an MP's nightmare, but he could well prove a taxpayers' dream. The 75-year-old cpi(m) stalwart was a reluctant appointee to the office of the Speaker, not inclined to trade articulation for arbitration in the House. He bowed to the wishes of his party, but his instinct to provoke rather than pacify the Opposition led to indiscretions. At a bar council function in July, he took a potshot at the former NDA government, saying it had been overwhelmingly rejected by the people in the elections. A storm of protest broke over his head, with the Opposition accusing him of prejudice and behaviour unbecoming of the Lok Sabha Speaker.

Thereafter, Chatterjee has not been able to reach a comfort level with the Opposition. "We could not perform at all," he admits about the stalling of the House proceedings. The tainted ministers' issue, with the attendant Shibu Soren and Uma Bharati controversies, paralysed Parliament. He says he has been scrupulously fair, a communist who is a speaker and not the other way around. "I am a communist. But show me one instance where I have allowed my views to influence my decision." He did manage to broker peace on the issue of standing committees, which the Opposition had threatened to boycott, but has a long way to go before he can win its confidence. "He is tough, as a Speaker should be. But he has to win over the Opposition," says a TDP MP.

There is an irony in Somnathda having to referee the 14th Lok Sabha. It was he who initiated the moves towards "secular" unity, which led to the formation of the UPA. He admits he never expected the lunch he hosted for the Congress party and its potential allies would land him in the chair in the Lower House, trying to control recalcitrant MPs. Chatterjee has no patience with filibustering. "Even schoolchildren behave better than MPs," he thundered one day.

Outside the House, he is trying to make the functioning of Parliament more transparent. Zero Hour, when MPs throw rules to the winds, is now shown live on TV. The earlier directive to focus on the chair when the House is being obstructed has been dropped-cameras show the MPs who create disturbance. Chatterjee has mooted a proposal to open standing committee meetings to the media. MPs who adopt a populist posture in the House but reverse it in the standing committee to please corporate interests, will now have to be on guard. Chatterjee is determined to see the move through. He has directed ministers to table a biannual action taken report (ATR) on standing committee reports, for which they will be held personally accountable.

The wastage of public money entailed by repeated adjournments disturbs him: "The success of any agitation seems to be to get Parliament adjourned. We are not serving the people. This puts a question mark about the utility of Parliament and of the electoral process." He appears to take the Opposition's conduct somewhat personally, even as he tried to make light of it: "The Speaker is behaving like a headmaster, so they have closed the school itself." The concern for the taxpayer reflects in his pruning the expenditure of the Lok Sabha secretariat. The cost of running the Speaker's office, invariably thrice the amount allocated, has been drastically cut. The strength of his personal staff has come down from 40-plus to 11. The size of his convoy too has been cut down to four. He refused a Sonata and his predecessor's bulletproof Contessa on the grounds that his bulk could only fit into an Ambassador. When told it would cost around Rs 25 lakh to bulletproof it, he said no. He turned down the offer of a personal car for his wife. He is not comfortable in the Speaker's residence either. "It is too big."

The other no-no in his office is any attempt to misuse its tremendous clout. One of his staffers was shown the door for exceeding his brief. Somnathda is determined to sweep the House clean. He expects less acrimony in the winter session. "In two months, the Maharashtra elections will be over. Tension will be less," he says. This comrade holds the hammer for less revolutionary purposes.