By IANS,
New Delhi : The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Thursday raised the issue of land in Haryana being granted to the Rajiv Gandhi Charitable Trust, forcing adjournment of the Lok Sabha.
BJP’s Rajnath Singh took up the issue as soon as the house met at 11 a.m. and demanded suspension of the question hour for a discussion on it.
Speaker Meira Kumar pleaded before protesting BJP members to let the house function and hold a discussion on the “extremely burning issue related to farmers” at the start of zero hour.
Rajnath Singh said the Haryana debate should get preference.
Meira Kumar went ahead and called for question hour, even taking a couple of questions. But the BJP would have none of it, and members walked down the aisle towards the speaker’s podium, shouting slogans.
They demanded that the land land allotment to the trust should be cancelled and “harassment of farmers” stopped.
However, the speaker ignored the protests and carried on with the question hour. Sensing this, the slogans by BJP MPs got louder, drowning out Railway Minister Dinesh Trivedi, who was replying to a question.
Amid the din, Parliamentary Affairs Minister P.K. Bansal said the matter was a state subject and related to the Haryana government. But this also didn’t help to convince the protesting members allow the house to function.
The speaker then adjourned the proceedings till noon. When the house met again at 12, the BJP protested again forcing another adjournment till 2 p.m.
The BJP has been alleging that the land belonging to farmers in Gurgaon’s Ullawas village was “unlawfully” taken away and transferred the trust named after the former prime minister late Rajiv Gandhi.
The Punjab and Haryana High Court earlier this month pulled up the Congress government in Haryana for flouting land laws in order to aid the the trust.
According to the website of Rajiv Gandhi Charitable Trust, it was established in 2002 by Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Vadra “to address areas of concern that were closest to Rajiv Gandhi’s heart”.