Bihar Opposition MLAs create ruckus in House

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A day after making missiles out of furniture and microphones inside the Assembly, poll-bound Bihar’s restive Opposition MLAs on Wednesday graduated to flinging slippers at the Speaker while pressing for chief minister Nitish Kumar’s resignation in view of the alleged “treasury scam” of Rs 11,412 crores.
The action-packed high drama that continued for hours inside and outside the heavily guarded state Assembly finally saw the suspension of 67 MLAs from Opposition parties such as the RJD, LJP, Congress, CPM and CPI-ML for the rest of the ongoing Monsoon Session. The Legislative Council had seen the suspension of 14 Opposition MLCs for unruly behaviour earlier on Tuesday.
In what was arguably yet another black day in India’s history of parliamentary democracy, the 67 MLAs, including 42 from the RJD and 11 from the LJP, were marshalled out of the Assembly one by one by the watch and ward staff. RJD state president Abdul Bari Siddiqui and deputy leader in the Assembly Shakeel Ahmed Khan were prominent among those who were physically removed outside.
As many as 76 Opposition MLAs, who had spent the entire Tuesday night in the well of the two Houses of the Bihar legislature without dinner and breakfast, defied Speaker Uday Narayan Chaudhary’s repeated appeals to let the House function in the morning. This prompted parliamentary affairs minister Brijendra Prasad Yadav to bring a resolution for the initial suspension of 16 MLAs — 10 from RJD, two from LJP, two independents, and one each from the CPI(M) and CPI(M-L) — for the rest of the ongoing Monsoon Session. The resolution was passed by a voice vote amid the deafening din.
It was when RJD MLA Bablu Dev was being physically removed that one of the Opposition MLAs — so far unidentified — hurled a pair of slippers at the Speaker. The slippers, however, missed their target. Then, on the Speaker’s order, all the protesting MLAs were marshalled out of the House.
In a rare show of Opposition unity four months before the Assembly polls, MLAs from the RJD, LJP, Congress and the Left parties had stalled the Assembly proceedings on Tuesday, clashing with the ruling JD(U)-BJP MLAs and getting injured while demanding the resignation of chief minister Nitish Kumar and his deputy Sushil Kumar Modi in light of the Patna high court’s order for a CBI probe into irregularities worth Rs 11,412 crores in welfare schemes. These irregularities were highlighted in the CAG report.
A furious Congress MLC Jyoti Kumari threw about a dozen flower pots at the watch and ward staff when they tried to prevent her from entering the Assembly. After being dragged away by three women staff, an apparently exhausted Kumari fainted and was rushed to the ICU of PMCH.