Rattling their sabres a bit harder, seven Congress MPs from Telangana on Saturday wrote to Lok Sabha speaker Meira Kumar seeking her permission to move a privilege motion against chief minister Kiran Kumar Reddy for refusing to meet them on the day of the Telangana March, last Sunday.
“Kiran Reddy violated our rights by refusing to give us an audience though we repeatedly tried to meet him and staged a sit-in at his camp office. The chief minister refused to even speak with us on the phone. Moreover, we were detained till the end of the march. It was humiliating to us. It was against all democratic norms and protocol rules. We have therefore decided to move a privilege motion against the chief minister in Parliament,” MPs wrote to Meira Kumar.
The seven Congress MPs are Ponnam Prabhakar, G Vivekanand, Gutta Sukhender Reddy, Madhu Yashki Goud, Siricilla Rajaiah, Manda Jagannadham and K Rajagopal Reddy.
In their letter, the MPs complained to the speaker that Kiran Reddy has set an “odious precedent” by not rebuffing their effort to bring to his notice illegal detentions of Telangana activists before the march.
“Had we been allowed, the government could have averted much of the damage done during the march. We strongly feel that the violent incidents that took place on Sept. 30 could have been avoided if the state government had dealt with us democratically,” the MPs wrote.
The MPs also complained that the state government agreed to grant permission for the march upon mediation by them, but then it breached the trust by resorting to arrests of Telangana activists and restricting the movement of vehicles to the state capital. The MPs said they tried to fulfil their constitutional obligations by meeting the chief minister to prevail upon him to stop the illegal arrests but were rebuffed.