Sukhbir seeks President’s intervention in convening Parliament’s winter session

CHANDIGARH: The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) president and MP Sukhbir Singh Badal on Friday called upon the President of India, urging his intervention for immediately convening the Winter Session of the Parliament.

The SAD president who, as MP had voted against the three farm Bills, in his letter to the President, copies of which have been marked to the Speaker, Lok Sabha and to the Vice President of India in his capacity as the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha, said, “It is absurd and ironical that the ruling party sees no danger to public health during gatherings of thousands of people in its election rallies in Bihar and now in West Bengal but wants the countrymen to believe that even a limited meeting of Members of Parliament under strict SOPs would result in a pandemic flare up? There is no lockdown on BJP rallies but there is a lockdown on Parliament comprising just a few hundred members, and that too under controlled circumstances. The Covid excuse is patently fake and even ridiculous.”

“The government is making a laughing stock of itself. But the tragedy is that ultimately the joke is on our poor people and on our sacred democratic traditions,” said the SAD president. Badal said that even if the pandemic excuse were to be accepted, the obvious question still remains. “Are our lives more important than the lives of the millions and millions of people whom we represent and who trusted their destiny and lives in our hands at the elections. Are we going to betray that innocent trust because we are scared of meeting to help these patriotic annadatas to go back to their homes feeling secure about their future?”

Describing the government’s attitude as a case of “historic blunder,” Badal said, “The ruling party’s stubbornness to listen to the country’s ‘annadata’ and to let them die within a few hundred yards of the Parliament would be remembered in history as a case of a heartless and conscience-less government at war with its own people?” Badal said that the Parliament must meet immediately as “a national priority”. The ongoing farmers’ movement affects nearly 100 crores of our people directly and the rest indirectly going by the percentage of the country’s population dependent on agriculture,” said Badal in his letter.