By IANS,
New Delhi : Information and Broadcasting Minister Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi Tuesday tried in vain to plead with Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) embers not to disrupt question hour in the Lok Sabha. He was seen placating the BSP members, who had given notice to suspend question hour to take up the problems of drought in Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh.
When question hour began, the BSP members got to their feet and used lung power to force anadjournment of the house for almost an hour.
Dasmunsi held the parliamentary affairs portfolio till recently.
-*-
Speaker comments on dances on TV
Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee is not always a hard task master. At times, he leaves the members in splits too. It happened Tuesday when during Zero Hour Sumitra Mahajan of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) raised the issue of sex education being imparted to school children.
Many members agreed with Mahajan that sex education was not needed in the form being planned. But Chatterjee said there were different viewpoints as well. He then said in Hindi, “Don’t you see dances these days on television in the evening?” Maybe, he was referring to the cheer leaders dancing during the IPL cricket matches these days.
-*-
Rahul without his usual companions
Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi is rarely seen sitting alone in the Lok Sabha. When he entered the house during Zero Hour Tuesday, there was none beside him. Sachin Pilot, Deepinder Singh Hooda, Naveen Jindal, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Jitin Prasada and Sandeep Dikshit, to name a few, always sat with him. Scindia and Jitin are now ministers, while others – particularly Pilot – are reportedly unhappy with Gandhi for not recommending them for ministerial berths.
-*-
JD-U member irked with Patil
Prabhunath Singh, Janata Dal-United member from Bihar, Tuesday sought Speaker Somnath Chatterjee’s permission to move a privilege motion against Home Minister Shivraj Patil so that he could be sent to jail for not keeping his promise of Bhojpuri being included in the constitution’s 8th Schedule.
Raising the issue during Zero Hour, Singh sought the chair’s permission to move a privilege motion against Patil for not keeping his umpteen assurances. The permission was not granted, but the chair offered one more assurance that the needful would be done.
Bhojpuri as a language is spoken in parts of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and also in far-off countries like Surinam and Mauritius, where people from the two states were sent by the British government decades ago as bonded labourers.
-*-
Bagrodia learns on the job
Learning the nitty-gritty of ministerial responsibility is not an easy job as newly-inducted Minister of State for Coal Santosh Bagrodia learnt Tuesday. Responding to a call attention motion on the subsidence of land in the coal belt in Asansol and Raniganj in West Bengal, and Jharia in Jharkhand, the minister said that every individual was free to come to him with any queries in this regard.
An alert Speaker Somnath Chatterjee immediately corrected him, saying “Not every individual, but every honourable member.” As a minister, it was Bagrodia’s maiden intervention in the lower house. He is a member of the Rajya Sabha.