Delhi govt muzzling Oppn voice, will complain to Prez, LS Speaker: LoP Bidhuri

Delhi BJP MLAs will meet the president and the Lok Sabha speaker to complain against the ''muzzling'' of their voice by the Arvind Kejriwal government in the assembly, Leader of Opposition Ramvir Singh Bidhuri said on Saturday.

The two-day Monsoon Session of the Delhi Assembly concluded on Friday.

''Opposition members had sent notices to the assembly speaker for raising important issues pertaining to the people of Delhi. But all were not taken up for consideration,'' Bidhuri said in a statement.

BJP MLAs will be approaching President Ram Nath Kovind and Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla to register a formal complaint against the ''indifferent attitude'' of the Delhi government and functioning of the assembly, he said.

The BJP has eight MLAs in the 70-member Delhi Assembly, while the ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has 62 members in the House.

The Leader of Opposition (LoP) accused the Kejriwal government of ''muzzling the voice of the Opposition'' in the House and said it did not allow any discussion in the assembly on the problems being faced by the people of the national capital.

The Opposition, he said, will not remain a silent spectator to the ''murder of democracy'' by the Kejriwal government and will approach the president and Birla with the formal complaint.

According to the LoP, BJP legislators Anil Bajpai, Vijendra Gupta and Jeetendra Mahajan had given notice on the issue of Delhi schools and colleges remaining closed for the past many months. ''These were made part of the agenda but suddenly we discovered that the same was not being taken up for discussions in the House,'' Bidhuri, the BJP MLA from Badarpur, said.

He said the Opposition had submitted ''seven notices'' for discussions in the Delhi assembly.

These pertained to issues such as “collapse” of Delhi's health infrastructure during the second Covid wave, “shortage” of water or supply of “contaminated” water and “failure” of the public works department and irrigation department to clean drains, which led to ''massive flooding'' in different parts of the city, Bidhuri said.

''The government should have used the floor of the House to answer all these concerns of the people of Delhi and reassure them, but instead, the Kejriwal government has sought to strangle the voice of the Opposition,” he said. “The House was being used by the government to achieve its mean selfish political interests or to target the central government and condemn it,'' he said.

The 68-year-old BJP leader also accused the ruling government in Delhi of allotting the Opposition with only ''20 minutes'' of time for the entire day to put forward its viewpoint.

''Nowhere in the country where there is a recognised opposition, the Leader of the Opposition gets a fixed time to speak but in the Delhi Assembly this was being done blatantly,'' he claimed.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)