Amid reports of widening rift among the Ministers and Bharatiya Janata Party ( BJP) MLAs which was evident during the recently concluded Winter Session of Uttarakhand Assembly, senior BJP leader and Chakrata MLA Munna Singh Chauhan has softened his bellicosity after the session is over. The leader who was among the BJP MLAs who left several Ministers red-faced by pointed and embarrassing questions in the House said on Monday that the hyperactivity of the treasury bench MLAs augurs well for the health of the parliamentary democracy.
Talking to The Pioneer at the secretariat here on Monday, Chauhan said that the media has been looking things from a wrong perspective. “With a small Assembly like we have, the chair allows many supplementary questions on one subject. It is not possible for the Ministers to answer every question.
In the just-concluded session, the performance of the Ministers was good. As far as the performance of the BJP MLAs was concerned, it was clear that they had come prepared for the Assembly which is a good sign,’’ he said.
Taking a dig at the Congress MLAs, the senior BJP leader said that they had come to the House ill-prepared.
Chauhan’s defence of the Ministers has assumed significance against the backdrop of the belief that some saffron lawmakers had targeted some Ministers in the House during the winter session with sharp-pointed queries, sending them in the dock.
The Education Minister Arvind Pandey was found fumbling many a time while taking on the MLAs’ razor-sharp queries. In one instance, he was heard saying sarcastically to one of the voluble saffron MLAs to keep quiet after his attempt to grab the media headline had succeeded.
In another instance, which proved to be a major embarrassment for the Government, an apparently disappointed Speaker Prem Chand Agarwal suspended a question on the status of cow in Uttarakhand as the House was not satisfied by the answer given by the Minister of State for animal husbandry Rekha Arya.
The question on the status of the bovines was asked by BJP MLA from Salt, Surendra Singh Jeena. He demanded the State Government to firm up a policy for the protection of the stray cows. The reply of the Minister failed to satisfy the member and adding to her misery, Munna Singh Chauhan said that in view of the Uttarakhand Assembly having passed a unanimous resolution to declare cow as Rashtra Mata, the reply of the Minister lacked sensitivity.
In another instance, Rajpur MLA Khajan Das was left annoyed as the written answer to his question provided to him by the Vidhan Sabha secretariat was different from the answer the Minister gave in the Assembly. The Minister’s response that whatever he was saying was correct left Das exasperated. Along with Chauhan, he ripped into the Minister for taking things lightly.
In yet another case, the senior BJP member Chandan Ram Das put the Environment and Forest Minister Harak Singh Rawat in the dock when he blamed the forest department for not acting on the Chief Minister’s declaration of setting up monkey cages in all the districts to curb the simian menace.
Apart from these instances, the young MLAs like Sanjeev Arya and Saurabh Bahuguna also embarrassed the ministers with their sharp-pointed questions during the Winter Session.