Three more Rajya Sabha members were suspended on Thursday, taking the total number of suspended Rajya Sabha members so far in the monsoon session of Parliament to 23. Including the suspension of four Lok Sabha members, 27 opposition members have been suspended so far in this session.
Since the opening day of the monsoon session, there has been a fierce conflict between the ruling coalition and the opposition parties. Paralyzing the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha has become a daily routine, with opposition members besieging the Speaker’s seat and raising slogans every day. The situation in the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha was slightly different on Thursday than on other days.
BJP members in both the Houses strongly condemned the use of the word “Rashtrapatini” by the Congress leader Ranjan Chaudhary to insult the President. Smriti Irani in the Lok Sabha and Nirmala Sitharaman in the Rajya Sabha urged Sonia Gandhi to apologise. Both the Houses were adjourned repeatedly as Opposition members raised slogans demanding price hike and rollback of GST as usual.
In this case, Aam Aadmi Party’s Susil Gupta and Sandip Patha, who are members of the Rajya Sabha, were carrying banners and chanting in violation of the rules, the Deputy Speaker Harivansh warned. Independent member Ajith Kumar Bhuyan was also named in the list of violators.
As Amali continued to freeze the House proceedings, Deputy Speaker Harivansh announced that the trio would be suspended for the rest of this week under Rule No. 256. Aam Aadmi Party’s Sanjay Singh was suspended under the same rule yesterday. It is to be noted that Harivansh suspended him on Tuesday after he allegedly tore documents and threw them at the Speaker’s seat.
Earlier on Tuesday, 19 opposition members were suspended under the same provision. These include DMK’s Shanmugam, Kanimozhi NVN Somu, NR Ilango, Girirajan, Kalyanasundaram and Abdullah. Apart from this, 7 members from Trinamool Congress Party; 3 members from Telangana Rashtriya Samithi Party; Two members of the Marxist Communist Party and one member of the Communist Party of India were suspended along with them. It is noteworthy that the suspended Members of Parliament staged a sit-in protest in the Parliament premises on Wednesday night.
Even though senior member of DMK in the Rajya Sabha, Trichy Siva acted as the Deputy Speaker of the House and requested the opposition members to keep calm, Amali was not satisfied. Hence the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha have been adjourned till tomorrow morning after a series of adjournments. Today’s stand-off in parliament is seen as a further escalation of the ongoing conflict since the start of the monsoon session.
– Ganapathi Subramaniam