Justifying the frequent protests leading to disruptions in the Rajya Sabha, CPI(M) leader Sitaram Yechury on Thursday said no assurance by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on conversion row led to disruptions. “The Prime Minister refused to give any such assurance on the floor of the House. This is what has caused the disruptions in the Rajya Sabha,” said Yechury.
“It is the Government’s obduracy in not promising to take action against its MPs, Ministers and Spokesmen who, in the pursuit of its real hidden Hindutva agenda, provoked this turmoil. Blaming Opposition is a classic example of ‘pot calling the kettle black’,” Yechury said in an editorial in the latest issue of CPI(M) organ ‘People’s Democracy’.Earlier, Modi was “forced to come and make a statement regretting the remarks made by a Minister of State who called people opposing the BJP ‘names’ in unparliamentary language. “He refused to tender an apology and finally had to accept a resolution moved by the Chair reflecting the sense of the House disapproving such comments,” he said. Despite PM’s brief intervention “however sanitised they may have been”, the RSS-BJP leaders at the highest level “continue to make provocative statements sharpening communal polarisation across the country,” he said.
Referring to the remarks of RSS chief in Kolkata and BJP president in Kerala pledging to continue the campaign of religious reconversion, the CPI(M) leader said “thus they ensured disruption of the last two days of Rajya Sabha.” Noting that the threat to India’s secular democratic republic was “multiplying”, Yechury said “it is no longer only a combination of rabid communal polarisation joining with aggressive pursuit of neo-liberal economic reforms any more.“These two are now combined with growing authoritarian trends like the resort to ‘ordinance raj’. Thus, both secularism and democracy - the foundations of our republic - will increasingly come under greater threat. This has to be foiled,” he said.