Calling upon the President Ram Nath Kovind, the Shiromani Akali Dal chief and Ferozepur MP Sukhbir Singh Badal on Friday urged his intervention for immediately convening the winter session of the Parliament.
Sukhbir has written to the President questioning the Government’s “excuse” of COVID-19 argument to justify the cancellation of the Parliament’s winter session. “How do you convince the people that the Parliament could meet to pass the three controversial Bills at a time when the pandemic was at its peak which required the Prime Minister to start the nation’s fight against it with a long, countrywide lockdown.
Now, by the Government’s own admission, the intensity of the pandemic no longer requires a lockdown.
Then, how does one justify the cancellation of the Winter Session? What was right then cannot be wrong now,” said Sukhbir.
In his letter, copies of which have been marked to the Lok Sabha Speaker and also to the Vice President of India in his capacity as the Rajya Sabha Chairman, SAD chief 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 MPs, under strict SOPs, would result in a pandemic flare up.”
“There is no lockdown on BJP rallies but there is lockdown on parliament comprising just a few hundred members, and that too under controlled circumstances,” said Sukhbir asserting that the “COVID excuse is patently fake and even ridiculous”.
Describing the Central Government’s attitude as a case of “historic blunder”, Sukhbir 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 conscienceless government at war with its own people?”
“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,” he said.