Jharkhand Assembly Speaker Dinesh Oraon on Friday called for a meeting with representatives of all parties prior to the Monsoon session scheduled to begin on July 22 and appealed to the leaders for smooth functioning of the House.
Parliamentary Affairs Minister Nilkanth Singh Munda said that the meeting was a part of the proceedings on road to the Assembly session.
“The ruling party and the opposition should take equal responsibility of ensuring smooth functioning of the Assembly,” he said.
However, Leader of Opposition and Jharkhand Mukti Morcha’s (JMM) Executive President Hemant Soren on Friday took a dig at Chief Minister Raghubar Das for being absent from the meeting and accused the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of trying to cause chaos in the assembly in an effort to avoid important issues.
“Many leaders of the ruling party have been absent from important meetings. The ruling Government wants to create hurdles in the proceedings of the Assembly,” Soren said.
BJP’s Chief Whip in the Assembly, Radha Krishna Kishore hit back at Soren, calling his statement vague. “Hemant Soren should first look at his own party and then point fingers at the ruling Government.
In the past four and a half years, all they have done is creating ruckus at the Assembly and staging protests,” he said.
Chief Minister Raghubar Das could not attend the meeting on Friday due to his poor health, officials from the Chief Minister’s Office (CMO) said. Kishore too was in Palamu on Friday, while several other BJP legislators were busy attending the party’s membership drive for which former Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Chouhan visited Ranchi, sources said.
Kishore added that the opposition was running out of issues as the people of the State have already expressed their opinion in the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections. “All the issues that they (opposition) had problems with have received peoples’ nod. Right now, they do not have any issues, so they are creating issues,” he said.
The Monsoon session of the State Assembly will begin on July 22 and conclude on July 26.
This is likely to be the last Assembly session before the next Assembly Elections, slated in Jharkhand by the end of this year.
The mob lynching of Tabrez Ansari in Saraikela is likely to cause major uproar in the upcoming Assembly session.
Besides, issues such as starvation deaths, land acquisition and sand ghats may also cause debates.