A rally at Santiniketan in Somnath’s support. Picture by Indrajit Roy See Bengal

July 24: From one vote by MPs, Somnath Chatterjee is straightaway headed for another.

Unlike in Parliament this week, he will be voting this time, with fellow MPs from a host of countries across the globe.

A day after the CPM expelled him for refusing to quit as Lok Sabha Speaker, Chatterjee was today looking ahead to his upcoming responsibilities in the job, armed with a pat on the back from the Prime Minister.

One of them is the August 1-10 Commonwealth Parliamentary Association conference in Kuala Lumpur that will elect its Chair. The vote will be conducted by the outgoing Chair, Bengal Speaker Hashim Abdul Halim of the CPM, but Chatterjee will like always be a prominent presence as a champion of Third World issues.

He is believed to be backing Mohammad Shafie Apdal, the Malaysia unity and culture minister, against Lord Swraj Paul, the British MP of Indian origin, in the contest.

It’s anyone’s guess how warmly India’s Speaker and Bengal’s will greet each other, considering Halim’s party has just thrown out Chatterjee. But old-timers recalled that Chatterjee had helped Halim win the association Chair the last time, marshalling support for him by using his good offices with then foreign minister Natwar Singh and foreign secretary Shyam Saran.

The Speaker will have to rush back once the conference ends, because he has an important engagement to chair in Parliament House on August 11: the inaugural Hiren Mukherjee lecture by Amartya Sen.

Chatterjee had announced the launch of the lecture, in memory of a Left colleague of long years, on February 25. He wants to make it part of Parliament’s annual calendar.

Chatterjee continued with his official functions today, unfazed by his expulsion. The Congress and its UPA allies have rallied round him, showering praise and asking him to stay on in the Lok Sabha Chair.

In a rare gesture, Manmohan Singh today dropped in at Chatterjee’s 20 Akbar Road residence for 10 minutes to appreciate the way he had conducted the trust vote. The Speaker also received a bouquet from Congress MP Priya Dutt, ahead of his birthday tomorrow.

“He will continue to receive our support,” Lok Janshakti Party leader Ram Vilas Paswan told reporters on a day DMK chief M. Karunanidhi was in Delhi but, probably in a long time, avoided any communication with the Left.

This wasn’t the first time the Outstanding Parliamentarian Award winner, whom the Lok Sabha website praises for his “abiding faith in parliamentary democracy”, had fallen foul of his party.

In 1993, he and Saifuddin Chowdhury, then a central committee member, had been censured for opposing the CPM’s decision to vote with the BJP against the P.V. Narasimha Rao government on a no-trust motion. Saifuddin was later expelled and now Chatterjee has met the same fate, on almost an identical issue.

Saifuddin, now leader of the Party for Democratic Socialism, today said from Delhi he wanted to meet Chatterjee soon to discuss the CPM’s “political bankruptcy”.

With inputs from Anindya Sengupta and Biswajit Roy