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Away from the limelight focused on Delhi Parliament, the Congress-led Opposition is alleging a parallel in the Kerala Assembly where seven days of protests ended with the House being adjourned sine die on Tuesday.
The Opposition’s main complaint was the repeated rejection by Speaker A N Shamsheer of notices for adjournment motion by it, mainly on issues in which Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan would have needed to reply.
The Assembly was originally to be in session till March 31, with scores of Bills lined up for discussion.
On Tuesday, as the Question Hour started, five MLAs of the Congress and its ally IUML announced an ‘indefinite satyagraha’ in the Well of the House. The Assembly rushed through the proceedings, including a list of the Bills slated to be taken up, before the Session was guillotined by Shamseer.
For the past one week, the Assembly has been rocked by protests, with the Opposition using various modes of agitation over “denial of our rights in the House”.
During the current Session, the Speaker denied permission for six notices for adjournment motion, without citing any reason. An adjournment motion is moved to draw the attention of the House to “a matter of urgent public importance having serious consequences”. Senior Congress legislator and former opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala pointed out that, in contrast, during the last Pinarayi-led Left Democratic Front government from 2016 to 2021, a total of eight notices for adjournment motion had been rejected.
“However, in the present regime, from 2021 till this Session, 11 notices have been rejected already, with eight in the current Session,’’ Chennithala said.
This reached a flashpoint on March 15 when the Speaker denied permission to Congress legislator Uma Thomas’s notice for an adjournment motion seeking to highlight the lack of safety of women, in the backdrop of an assault on a minor girl in the state capital.
Following the Speaker’s denial, a section of the Opposition MLAs marched to the office of the Speaker, accusing him of bias, and got into a scuffle with the security staff at the Assembly. Some MLAs from the Treasury benches also joined the mayhem.
Later, both sides filed complaints with the police, but charges of non-bailable offences were registered against only Opposition MLAs. For the next few days, the House was stalled due to Opposition protests against the case against its seven MLAs.
The same day as the clashes in the House, the Speaker also denied notice for an adjournment motion to discuss police action against UDF councillors in the Kochi Municipal Corporation, in the wake of protests over a recent garbage dump fire. The Opposition then staged a “parallel assembly” in the Well of the House. An MLA stood in for the Speaker and another for the CM, before the legislators staged a walkout.
In another episode with shades of the happenings in Parliament, the Opposition accused Sabha TV run by the Assembly of “censorship” after it did not telecast the uproarious scenes in the Assembly. Last week, a few Opposition MLAs shot the visuals of the protest on their mobile phones inside the House, which invited a censure from the Speaker.
Drawing a parallel with the confrontation between the Narendra Modi government and the Opposition at the Centre, Congress MLAs during the Session more than once called Pinarayi “a mundu-wearing Modi”.
Congress Leader of Opposition V D Satheesan said the government can’t just decide that it won’t talk with the Opposition. “We won’t succumb before the arrogant stand of Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan. We will not let him usurp the rights of the Opposition. It is not a CPI(M) state committee, where you can take any arbitrary decision… We cannot cooperate with the Speaker either if he is meddling in the rights of the Opposition.”
CPI(M) leader and Public Works Minister Muhammed Riyas attacked the Opposition, saying its stand in the Assembly was “part of BJP agenda”. “What we have seen in the House is a bid to cover up the internal squabbling in the Congress. The trouble in the Assembly is the handy work of only Satheesan and a few Congress legislators,’’ he said.
