Suspension of 3 Cong MLAs revoked

Geetanjali Gayatri

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, August 26

The Assembly revoked the six-month suspension of three Congress MLAs on the opening day of the monsoon session here today. The MLAs were suspended by the House for six months during the Budget session earlier this year for “interrupting and tearing up the Governor’s address”.

Raising the issue immediately after the obituary references on the opening day of the session, Congress MLA Randeep Singh Surjewala urged Speaker Kunwar Pal Gujjar to revoke the suspension of party MLAs Kuldeep Sharma, Jaiveer Singh and Jagbir Singh Malik in keeping with the “spirit of democracy”.

“It is the first time that three members have been suspended for a period of six months. In the face of a conflict, our members had only registered their protest and the Congress MLAs stayed out of the entire last session. We urge the Speaker and the Leader of the House to put an end to this friction by revoking the suspension since, in a democracy, the Opposition is as important as the government,” Surjewala said.

While BJP chief whip Gian Chand Gupta responded by saying that the Opposition ought to understand that every right had a corresponding duty and the decision of the House to suspend them was taken after due deliberation.

The INLD, too, supported the demand of the Congress to revoke the suspension of the MLAs with deputy leader of the INLD Legislature Party, Jaswinder Singh Sandhu, urging the Speaker to call back the MLAs.

The Congress and the BJP both seemed in a “compromise mode” though it was advantage Congress which got away without an apology or regret while the treasury benches seemed satisfied with the former’s admission that “tearing the address was wrong”.

While Finance Minister Capt Abhimanyu said that the Speaker and the Chief Minister had been very accommodating in the past and even gave the Congress a chance to admit its wrong-doing, Health Minister Anil Vij, taking a dig at the Congress, said: “It is because of your small experiment to suspend the Congress MLAs for six months that they have learnt the meaning of words like ‘stifling the voice of the Opposition’. We were not even allowed to stand up to make our point during the Congress rule. This much lesson is enough. Consider their request sympathetically and call back the MLAs.”

Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar said that democracy did not mean a “free-for-all”. “To disrupt and tear up the Governor’s address is an insult to the House and the Governor. We cannot set a wrong precedence by calling them back without some kind of admission of their wrong-doing and we will not insist on an apology,” Khattar maintained.

Finally, it took former Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda’s intervention to revoke the suspension. “I did not want to intervene on the issue but I am forced to remind you of the agreement arrived at during a meeting chaired by the Speaker in which it was decided that the suspension would be revoked. However, the House refused to abide by the commitment made by the Speaker and the Chief Minister and disregarded it. Tearing an address can never be justified. There is no dispute about this,” he stated.

At this, Khattar recommended the revocation of the suspension and the Speaker passed the order that the members could come to the House from the next sitting. The Congress MLAs requested that the MLAs be called back from today which, too, was accepted.