Leader of the Opposition in the Legislative Council D V Sadananda Gowda on Wednesday requested Chairperson D H Shankaramurthy to summon retired IAS officer V Balasubramanian to the House and admonish him for his reported comments that politicians are protecting land grabbers.
Referring to an interview of Balasubramanian published in a Kannada daily, Gowda said the official has wrongly accused him of encouraging land grabbing. He said he would be submitting a petition to the chair seeking to refer the issue to the privileges committee as the former bureaucrat had defamed him.
The retired additional chief secretary was the chairman of a task force which probed into land grabbing cases.
“Balasubramanian should know his limits and not act as if he is Sathya Harishchandra.
He was given the mandate of preparing a report and submitting it to the government. Once he has done that, he should not go around and shoot his mouth off to newspapers, making false charges against legislators,” Sadananda Gowda said.
Coffee growers’ issue
He said that as MP from Udupi, he had approached the then Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa seeking relief to coffee estate owners. “But the retired officer has said that I tried to persuade the chief minister not to issue notices to coffee estate owners who were growing coffee on an acre or half-an-acre, speculating that no one can grow coffee in such small area. I can prove that there are people growing coffee in small fragments of land across the entire region,” he said.
He said the former officer was trying to assassinate his character. Gowda was lent support by most of the members from the opposition and treasury benches in his call for moving a privilege motion against Balasubramaniam.
However, adding a word of caution, M C Nanaiah (JD-S) said that in a bid to bring Balasubramanian to book for his remarks against the legislators, the government should not bury the report submitted by him.