Parmar unanimously elected 17th Speaker
SHIMLA: A day after he resigned from the health ministry, Vipin Singh Parmar was on Wednesday unanimously elected the 17th Speaker of the Himachal Pradesh assembly on Wednesday.
Deputy Speaker Hans Raj announced this in the assembly on the second day of the ongoing budget session here after the pas- sage of four resolutions for Parmar’s election as the Speaker. One of the resolutions was presented by chief minister Jai Ram Thakur. The four resolutions are a part of assembly procedure.
Thakur, who is also the leader of the House, along with opposition leader Mukesh Agnihotri took him to the Speaker’s chair amid loud applause.
Parmar, 55, was unanimously declared the new Speaker as no other member of the assembly filed a nomination. The Congress, with a strength of 21 members in the 68-member House, did not file any nomination for the post. district for the Speaker’s post. Following that, Parmar filed his nomination papers on Tuesday.
FROM LAW GRADUATE TO LAWMAKER
Born on March 15, 1964, in Kangra’s Nanao village, Parmar is a law graduate from Government College, Dharamshala.
He was the organising secretary of the ABVP for more than eight years in the ’80s and went on to become the national secretary. He was president of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha’s (BJYM) Kangra-chamba unit. Later, he became the Kangra BJP district president.
A protégé of former CM Shanta Kumar, Parmar contested his first election from Sulah, the home turf of his mentor, in the 1995 byelections but lost. He was elected to the assembly from Sulah for the first time in 1998. He lost the next election but was re-elected in 2007.
During this, he served as the state BJP general secretary twice. He lost the 2012 assembly election but was elected for the third term in 2017 and appointed health and family welfare minister in Thakur’s cabinet.