BRS boycotts Telangana Assembly winter session, alleges Speaker bias

Hyderabad: The main opposition Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) on Friday announced a boycott of the ongoing winter session of the Telangana Legislative Assembly, accusing Speaker Gaddam Prasad Kumar of bias and alleging that the House was being run in a “unilateral” manner by the Congress government.

Senior BRS MLA T Harish Rao said the Speaker had adopted a “partial attitude” and was preventing BRS members from criticising Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy. He alleged that the party’s voice was being “muzzled” in the House.

“He (the Speaker) says he will not let me use the mike to talk about the Chief Minister. Then, what is the point in attending the Assembly? BRS has decided to boycott this session against the Speaker’s partial attitude. The Speaker needs to provide equal rights to all members,” Harish Rao, deputy leader of the BRS in the Assembly, said.

He further alleged that the Assembly was being run like a “Congress office” and claimed that the opposition was denied an opportunity to respond even after the Chief Minister used what he described as “foul language” against the BRS on the floor of the House.

BRS members staged a walkout on Friday in protest against what Rao termed the “unilateral functioning” of the House.

Referring to Revanth Reddy’s remarks that it would not be wrong even if BRS president K Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR) and Harish Rao were “hanged” for causing “greater injustice” to Telangana through irrigation projects, the BRS leader strongly condemned the comments and accused the Chief Minister of speaking like a “rowdy element”.

“Rahul Gandhi carries the Constitution in his hand, but democracy is being murdered in the Assembly. The main opposition is not being given the mike,” Harish Rao said.

He also accused the Chief Minister of imposing an “RR tax per square foot” for building construction permissions and alleged that a “price for corruption” had been fixed.