By IANS,
New Delhi : Congress MPs from Telangana Friday appeared in the Lok Sabha with black bands around their mouths to indicate that there was a gag order on their speaking about separate statehood for the region in Andhra Pradesh.
The Telangana issue disrupted house proceedings for the second day as the Congress MPs, including Madhu Goud Yakshi, M. Jagannathan, Ponnam Prabhakar, Sarvey Satyanarayana, K. Rajagopal Reddy and G. Vivekananda, protested silently.
But Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) members raised noisy protests with Telugu Desam Party MPs countering them, leading to a melee and a brief adjournment of the house.
As soon as the house met at 11 a.m., a day after being adjourned for the day over the issue, TRS’ K. Chandrashekar Rao and Vijaya Shanthi walked towards Speaker Meira Kumar’s podium demanding that the government explain its silence on a separate Telangana state.
Congress members entered the house with black bands inviting the speaker’s ire. She said it was against decorum and parliamentary norms.
Communist Party of India leader Gurudas Dasgupta, a senior parliamentarian, asked Congress members whether sporting black bands in the house was against parliamentary rules. However, they didn’t remove them, prompting the speaker to adjourn the house for 15 minutes.
The speaker called the protesting pro-Telangana members to her chamber for a meeting. Sources said she invited the attention of Congress MPs to the house rules and threatened that sporting black bands in the house could lead to their suspension from the Lok Sabha.
The protesting Congress MPs were not present in the house when it re-assembled later.