NDA looks for ways to make its voice heard in House
The BJP and its alliance partners will be holding a meeting here on Wednesday morning to finalise their strategy on the alleged attempts by the UPA government and Lok Sabha speaker Somnath Chatterjee to “muzzle” their voice in the House.
By TNN |
NEW DELHI: The BJP and its alliance partners will be holding a meeting here on Wednesday morning to finalise their strategy on the alleged attempts by the UPA government and Lok Sabha speaker Somnath Chatterjee to “muzzle” their voice in the House.
Unlike the previous occasion, when the Speaker-Opposition spat turned bitter, the two sides, however, were careful not to raise the pitch of their respective campaigns to uncomfortable levels. With the government’s top managers taking steps to defuse the tension, there were indications that the Opposition would not like to walk the full distance in battling the government and the Lok Sabha Speaker.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and leader of the House Pranab Mukherjee opened channels of communication with the leader of the Opposition LK Advani hours after the BJP staged a walk-out from the Lok Sabha and the BAC on Monday in protest against the Speaker’s refusal to allow them to raise the issue pertaining to party president Rajnath Singh’s arrest in West Bengal.
“Both the prime minister and the leader of the House sought the Opposition’s help in running the House smoothly,” BJP spokesman VK Malhotra told newspersons while apprising them about the contours of the discussions between the two sides.
“Mr Advani, on his part, assured the two leaders of the BJP’s commitment to let the House function properly. But he also told them that it’d be difficult for the Opposition to honour its word if the government was determined to rush its business through in the melee,” Mr Malhotra said.
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BJP’s main grouse was that the Speaker, acting on the advice of parliamentary affairs minister Priyaranjan Dasmunsi, not only prevented them from raking up the issue during the zero hour, but he also helped the government rush through crucial business in the din. He reiterated his party’s complaint that both the government and the Speaker did little to ease the situation by their attempts to “bulldoze” the Opposition during zero hour on Monday. The House, in the past, Mr Malhotra said, has been adjourned for five minutes because of the efforts of a handful of Left and Congress members.
“There is a convention that business in the House is not transacted in the din. But this is precisely what had happened on Monday, even as we continued to raise our voice,” he said.
He saw in the entire affair a deliberate attempt to deny the BJP its rightful place as the principal opposition party. “We have persistently been subjected to injustice in the Lok Sabha,” Mr Malhotra claimed.
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