The Madhya Pradesh Assembly was adjourned for the day shortly after it had met on Tuesday as the main Opposition members began protesting in the well of the House. Their target was chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, who reportedly told mediapersons at Shivpuri the other day that a land mafia had become active and was collecting money to remove him.
As the House met on Tuesday, the demand was raised from the Congress side that the chief minister should tell the House the names of those, who were part of the land mafia that was mobilising funds to dislodge him and for whom this money was being collected. Deputy leader of the Opposition Choudhary Rakesh Singh Chaturvedi and Kalpana Parulekar were the first to raise the issue at the start of Question Hour.
Speaker Ishwardas Rohani gave the assurance that a discussion would be allowed but the Congress members were not in a relenting mood and kept pressing for immediate discussion on their adjournment motion. They even rushed to the well of the House and began shouting slogans. Attempts by the chief minister at this stage to intervene were drowned in the noise and din which grew louder as most of the ruling BJP members also stood up and started demanding former Union Carbide chief Warren Anderson’s extradition, punishment to those responsible for the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster and adequate compensation to the gas victims. The Speaker rushed with the listed business and adjourned the House. Later, the Congress MLAs sat on a protest in front of the Speaker’s chamber.
When the chief minister was asked to give his reaction, after the Assembly was adjourned, he said that his version would be shared with the press later during the day. A CD with the video recording and typescript of chief minister’s press conference at Shivpuri was officially released to the press by state minister Narottam Mishra on Tuesday afternoon. In this CD, the chief minister has been shown saying: “a campaign has been launched against vested interests in Indore. Not one but many belonging to the land mafia are now in jail... but now, those against whom action is taken get rattled and even go to the extent of thinking that this chief minister should go. For this, (they) collect money and resort to manoeuvres. To dislodge him, I am telling the truth, they even try at this level.”
The CM also told the media at Shivpuri that the land mafia has been flourishing under successive governments.