JOIN USBJP MLAs suspended from House
Nineteen BJP MLAs were suspended from the House on Thursday for the remaining part of the winter session of the Delhi Assembly after they created a ruckus, demanding a condolence notice for the victims of the 2001 Parliament House attack.
Speaker Yoganand Shastri took the decision after three adjournments of the House failed to discipline opposition benches as they continued shouting slogans and demanding immediate hanging of the main accused Afzal Guru.
The Bharatiya Janata Party members present in the House have been barred from attending further sittings in the four-day session which ends on Friday.
While leader of opposition V K Malhotra termed the suspensions “dictatorial and unwarranted”, chief minister Sheila Dikshit said the BJP demand was politically motivated – as the party had not called for such a notice during earlier anniversaries of the attack.
“I do not remember them proposing a condolence notice before. Their demand is not out of any sympathy for anyone but politically motivated,” said Dikshit.
Her parliamentary secretary Mukesh Sharma later said, “The BJP MLAs and MPs have got instructions from RSS headquarters in Nagpur and Jhandewalan (Delhi) to rake up the issue of Afzal Guru to evoke passion and to polarise voters in Gujarat.”
He added that neither Delhi government nor the Speaker has the authority to hang anyone, and the Assembly was the wrong place to raise the issue.
Malhotra rebutted the charge that the party had taken instructions from the RSS, adding that was anyway returning to power in Gujarat.
The BJP leader again accused the Speaker of being the government’s yes man when Shastri asked him if had been to the homes of the Parliament attack victims.
“You may not like it Professor saheb,” the Speaker said. “But I would like to ask you as to how many victims’ houses did you go to in the last 11 years.”
Malhotra complained that the Speaker did not read out the no-confidence motion proposed by the BJP against him. “We had given him a letter about our intentions but he did not read it out. Before we could have taken up the issue, we were suspended from the House.”