New Delhi: Congress-led Opposition parties are thinking to write a rare letter of protest to Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu to complain against what they allege that he had played a partisan role while conducting the Rajya Sabha proceedings.
This is the first such instance that a letter of this style is being sent to the Rajya Sabha chairman.
Speaker Sumitra Mahajan, who is Mr. Naidu’s counterpart in the Lok Sabha has also already received such a letter this session. A total of eight opposition leaders had questioned in the protest letter, the way she dealt with their attempt to move a no-trust motion against the government in the last session.
Apart from Congress, leaders like from Trinamool Congress of Mamata Banerjee, Samajwadi Party of Akhilesh Yadav and Nationalist Congress Party of Sharad Pawar had also agreed to the move.
“Some more parties are expected to join in,” a senior opposition leader said.
The parties, according to a Congress leader, had been discussing how to clearly let their anguish be conveyed to the presiding officer for some time, but as of now are had settled for a letter to send its message.
According to sources, the letter is expected to broadly underline three points.
One among them is the growing perception among the opposition parties that the Rajya Sabha secretariat’s television channel was being used to run down the opposition in the house and to propagate the ruling party’s view.
As per the opposition leaders claim, they were also peeved for the two questions asked in parliament and the government’s response over it recently disappeared from the Rajya Sabha website. They again appeared only after media reported about the omission.
The opposition has been repeatedly questioning the way of conduct of the house at a time when BJP president Amit Shah was speaking this week.
Mr adjourned the house at a time when opposition members protested to disparaging comment Mr. Shah made to former prime ministers in his speech over the row of Assam citizen’s list on Tuesday.
The most curious thing the opposition found was that the house was adjourned at 1 pm only for 10 minutes rather than break for lunch as per the tradition earlier.
“Sir, why are you calling a break like this? It is ten past one,” Derek O’Brien of the Trinamool Congress asked about the unusually short break when the house resumed.
“First you answer, why is this disturbance?” Mr. Naidu shot back. The house was adjourned for the day a few minutes later.
Opposition leaders, on Wednesday, again found it odd that the chairman invited Mr. Shah to complete his speech that he had not been able to put up the conclusion due to continuous disruptions in the house rather than straightaway question Home Minister Rajnath Singh to respond.
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