Karnataka Speaker draws left, Cong heat over invites to religious leaders to new MLAs’ camp

Making the announcement about the camp recently, Khader said that the participants will be offered lessons on meditation and yoga therapy, apart from classes on the legislators’ role and various kinds of debates and committees, among other things, that they are likely to encounter at the Assembly.

However, soon reports emerged that the invitees for giving the first-time MLAs such instructions would include the Art of Living’s founder Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, BJP Rajya Sabha MP and hereditary administrator of Dharmasthala Veerendra Heggade, and right-wing motivational speaker Gururaj Kajaragi, among others.

The choice of venue for the event, Nelamangala, which is part of the SDM Group of Institutions, also came under fire. Many argued that the new legislators must be trained in the Assembly complex itself. Heggade, the SDM Group chairman, was recently made Rajya Sabha MP by the BJP, while Kajaragi has been a vocal critic of the Congress policies, especially its guarantee schemes.

Congress spokesman and ex-MLC Ramesh Babu was among the first to react. “I request you to reconsider the list of resource persons identified for the training camp, as there are disagreements over their selection,” he wrote in a letter to Speaker Khader. Any resource person participating at the training camp should be concerned about society, he added. “The value of the camp will be reduced if a person aligned to one ideology, or someone who thinks with prejudice, is given an opportunity to place their views,” he said in the letter.

Several progressive thinkers and writers also wrote to Khader, urging him to cancel the speeches by religious leaders at the new MLAs’ camp. They included authors G Marulasiddappa and S G Siddaramaiah, literary critic Rajendra Chenni, activist K S Vimala, educational expert V P Niranjanaardhya and others, who wrote to Khader against inviting “advocates of communal policies”. The Speaker should “remember that secularism means keeping religion away from politics. While it is a personal decision of an MLA to participate in religious rituals, it is against constitutional norms that new MLAs are expected to get religious motivation before entering the Assembly,” they wrote.

With the issue gaining traction, Khader made a request to the protesters to stop criticising the programme, naming senior legislators H K Patil, T B Jayachandra, Krishna Byregowda and others as invitees to train the participants. “Apart from this, there will be 45-minute spiritual sessions everyday. For this, we planned to invite a few spiritual leaders. However, we have not received any confirmation on this,” he said.

Many of the comments made in the public sphere about the training programme were based on social media speculations, said the Speaker. On the participation of Sri Sri Ravishankar, he said the spiritual leader was unavailable as he was out of station.

“Let them wait for the programme to be complete. If it is not up to the mark, let them give their feedback,” Khader said, adding that he would consider the suggestions while organising such events in the future.