Kolkata, March 19 (IANS) As West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is set to attend the fifth day of the second phase of the budget session on Wednesday, there is little chance of her coming face-to-face with Leader of Opposition (LoP) Suvendu Adhikari in the House.
This is because, although the opposition leader’s one-month suspension from attending the House proceedings ended on Monday, he has announced that he will not attend the remaining days of the session as a mark of protest against the similar suspension of his fellow BJP legislator Dipak Barman until March 20 when the current session ends.
At the same time, Adhikari will be busy with his schedule for a protest rally, scheduled in the afternoon in the Baruipur Assembly constituency in South 24 Parganas district, where the elected legislator is Speaker Biman Bandopadhyay.
In the rally at Baruipur, as claimed by the leadership, he will highlight the problems faced by the BJP legislators in presenting their arguments in the Assembly allegedly because of the one-sided functioning of the Speaker.
“So unless there is a last-minute decision of any schedule change, there is hardly any chance of the Chief Minister and the LoP coming face to face on the floor of the House,” said a BJP legislator.
Adhikari could not attend almost the entire first and second phases of the budget sessions after he was suspended from attending the proceedings of the House on February 17, when the first round of the session was on.
There were past records of him being suspended from attending the proceedings of the House and he had described the LoP’s consecutive suspension, and too for so many days, as unprecedented in the Assembly history.
He has also accused the Speaker of not deliberately allowing the live-streaming of the proceedings of the House to keep the common people in the dark about what is happening within the walls of the Assembly
–IANS
src/dpb
