Bhopal, May 14: Amid high drama, Madhya Pradesh Assembly Speaker Ishwardas Rohani broke down after a woman BJP MLA alleged that some Congress members had made indecent remarks against her.
Lalita Yadav, who represents Chhattarpur, wept as she complained to the Speaker that some Congress MLAs had made “objectionable remarks” against her when she was entering the Assembly premises on Wednesday.One of the comments being that she came late to the House as she had been to a beauty parlour.
Yadav narrated the incident to the Speaker inside the House yesterday when her turn came for giving suggestions on turning Madhya Pradesh into a ‘Golden State’, for which a four-day special session is being held.
Following this, the Speaker also broke into tears in his chamber on Wednesday and BJP members, including Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, rushed to console him.
Main Opposition Congress, which is boycotting the special session, said the reaction of the Speaker and Yadav was a ploy to divert the people’s attention from key issues.
The party also made light of the episode and said that the two were shedding “crocodile tears”.
Stating that the issue was being blown out of proportion to hog limelight, Congress MLA Kalpana Parulekar questioned as to why the Speaker did he not cry when double-meaning remarks were made in the House against women members.”Why did he (Rohani) not react in the same manner when women MLAs Pushpa Bharti and Kalyani Pande were humiliated in the House earlier by Gopal Bhargava and Babulal Gaur, and why did they not bring a censure motion at that time,” she asked.
Congress MLAs, while raising various issues in the House, shouted slogans like ‘Ghariali ansoo bahana band karo’ (stop shedding crocodile tears).Countering this, BJP members shouted “shame shame” and later the Chief Minister moved a censure resolution against the Congress members, which was passed by a voice vote.Parulekar said the remark against the woman MLA was made in the morning and the matter was raised in the evening which smacks of a plan to divert people’s attention from other important issues.
A weeping Yadav, along with other BJP women MLAs, met party leader Sushma Swaraj at her official residence here and narrated the incident.
Swaraj, the Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha, termed as “most unfortunate” the incident happened with the ruling BJP MLA on the state Assembly premises.
“The behaviour of the Congress MLAs with Lalita is shameful and most unfortunate,” a party release quoting Swaraj said.
“It appears that the opposition in the state has gone insane and frustrated with the pace of development under the BJP rule in the state and therefore behaving in an undemocratic manner,” she said. Swaraj said in democracy Opposition has the right to protest, but they should not cross the limits of decency in public life.
-PTI