By IANS
Chandigarh : Three legislators from the ruling Congress in Haryana Wednesday moved separate petitions with Haryana Assembly Speaker Raghubir Singh Kadian, seeking the unseating of former chief minister and senior Congress leader Bhajan Lal and two other sitting legislators.
The petitions, moved by Congress legislators Shadi Lal Batra, Jitender Malik and Ramesh Gupta, sought the disqualification and unseating of Bhajan Lal, Dharampal Malik and Rakesh Kamboj – all three sitting Congress legislators – from the assembly as they had joined a newly-floated party, the Haryana Janhit Congress.
The petitioner legislators pointed out that Bhajan Lal and the two others had contested the last assembly election on the Congress party tickets and since they have now floated and joined a new political outfit, they should be unseated and disqualified under the anti-defection law.
Malik and Kamboj are two Congress legislators known to be close to the former chief minister.
“Let them do what they want to. It makes no difference to me. I shall give a reply at an appropriate time,” Bhajan Lal said after the petition seeking his unseating was moved.
Speaker Kadian said he had received and admitted the three petitions seeking to unseat the three Congress legislators.
Bhajan Lal and his MP son Kuldeep Bishnoi – who was last year suspended from the Congress party for his utterances against Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Sigh Hooda – last month floated the new political party.
Bhajan Lal fell foul of the Congress leadership at the centre and in the state after Hooda pipped him to the post of chief minister in March 2005 despite having led the Congress back to power with a thumping three-fourth majority in the assembly after a gap of 10 years.