Govt to convene all-party meeting to break logjam in Parliament

Congress made it clear that the House would not function unless External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan chief ministers, Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Vasundhara Raje respectively, resigned.

Amid repeated disruptions and continuing logjam in the ongoing monsoon session of Parliament, Speaker Sumitra Mahajan convened an all-party meeting in New Delhi.

“Government had planned to talk to Congress today morning, but due to the CPP meeting Congress leaders were not free”.

Leader of Congress in the Lok Sabha, Mallikarjun Kharge, stated Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh hinted that the federal government would attempt to name a gathering to resolve the difficulty.

“This is our demand”, he said, adding that they were trying to convince the government on this which was not agreeing.

Citing the incident in which she had pulled up Chowdhury after he banged his placard on her table, she said she saw several young people in the visitor’s gallery and felt bad about the impression of Parliament they would carry in their mind. He said that the tradition of demanding resignation was set by BJP when they were in opposition. “This is not right”, Kharge said. They are not taking initiative. They don’t want to tackle the problem.

The Modi government has already ruled out the resignations of the three BJP leaders.

She also rejected the charge that Lok Sabha TV was blacking out Opposition protests and said guidelines to this effect were formulated by the then Speaker in 2010 and she had not given any such instructions.

“The home minister was to make a statement on the terror attack in Gurdaspur…it’s a major statement as the attack from across the border has re-occurred after a long time and is important for the parliament to discuss it”, he said.

Both the Houses of Parliament have not been able to function since last week with main opposition Congress and a few other parties aggressively raking up the demand for Swaraj’s resignation over her alleged help to tainted former IPL chief Lalit Modi in getting travel documents to fly out of Britain. Mahajan said the decorum of the House had to be maintained. Their political propaganda stands exposed. “Even on the execution of death sentence given to 1993 Mumbal blast convict Yakub Memon, their leaders are speaking in different voices”, Jaitley said.