In a rare gesture, prime minister Manmohan Singh crossed over to the opposition benches in the Lok Sabha on Thursday and spoke to opposition leader Sushma Swaraj and BJP veteran Lal Krishna Advani for two minutes after his reply to the motion of thanks to the president for her address to parliament on Monday.

Those covering parliament as also the old MPs said no prime minister, in their memory, has ever walked to the opposition side while it is usually the opposition leaders and others from the opposition that walk to him in the House.

Dr Manmohan Singh got the time to go and chat with Advani and Swaraj when the Speaker abruptly adjourned the House for 15 minutes on noting RSP member Prasanta Kumar Majumdar from West Bengal collapsed in his seat on a back bench and doctors brought in to attend and take him to hospital.

The Congress MPs were unhappy at the PM not only making a reciprocal approach, but also steering clear of attacking the BJP and the RSS in his reply despite arrest of many RSS and saffron leaders in a series of terror attacks and rather stating that terrorism has no religion.

They were expecting Dr Manmohan Singh correct the dismissal of major threats to the internal security in the President's address in just one sentence that "terrorism, fundamentalism, ethnic violence and left wing extremism continue to pose major challenges." Instead, he seems building bridges with the BJP, they grumbled.

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Sonia Gandhi was red faced to see only six Congress MPs present on Thursday at 2pm when Lok Sabha resumed session to hear Pranab Mukherjee,  leader of Lok Sabha to read out the formation of JPC on 2G.
 
Sonia Gandhi turned towards Pavan Kumar Bansal and V Narayanaswami, two ministers of parliamentary affairs to rush and bring MPs and to see
this from the press gallery, one could make out the visible annoyance of Sonia that her own MPs were behaving too casually.
 
Prime Minister and Pranab Mukherjee by that occupied their seats.

Really Sonia Gandhi has felt her responsbility. But she also noticed a remarkable number of ministers absence in the treasury benches.