All Congress MLAs on Friday submitted their resignation as members of Madhya Pradesh Assembly to the All-India Congress Committee (AICC) general secretary in charge of Madhya Pradesh affairs, B.K. Hariprasad, saying they have been compelled to take this extreme step as the state Bharatiya Janata Party government and the Assembly Speaker took the undemocratic step of terminating the membership of two Congress MLAs — Chaudhary Rakesh Singh Chaturvedi and Kalpana Parulekar — when they were trying to raise questions linked with corruption in the House on Wednesday.
Mr Haripsad said that a decision on the Congress MLAs resignation would be taken after discussing the matter with the party high command. He said that the Congress party will take up the ruling party’s undemocratic action before the people and also go to court and raise the issue in the Assembly. All the Congress MLAs agreed that they should follow the Dabra spirit (associated with a convention organised by late Madhavrao Scindia at Dabra in Gwalior division before the 1993 Assembly election to project party unity) and organise a series of party rallies all over the state — starting from Bhind and Mahidpur — the Assembly constituencies of the two expelled Congress MLAs.
Besides Mr Harisprasad, others present at the Congress legislators’ meeting at the state Congress headquarters here were Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh, state Congress chief Kantilal Bhuria, former Union minister Suresh Pachouri and Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly Ajay Singh.
In a related development, the Bhopal police used tear gas shells and batons to control angry Youth Congress activists, who had come here from all over the state to participate in a rally in the capital on Friday to protest against the termination of the two Congress MLAs. Dozens of those injured were rushed to different city hospitals. The police used force when there was some stone pelting and the Youth Congress workers tried to break the police cordon.