Day after Parliament washout, BJP and Congress announce protest plans

Parliament adjourned sine die, least productive Budget session since 2000; political slugfest moves to the streets with BJP, Congress announcing protest fasts.

A view of the parliament building. (File | Reuters)

NEW DELHI: With the second half of the Budget session totally washed out and Parliament adjourned sine die on Friday, the political battle to milk it moved to the people’s court as the BJP and Congress announced dates for their respective protest fasts.

Hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi said all BJP MPs would undertake a fast on April 12 against the Opposition disrupting Parliament, the Congress jumped in with party president Rahul Gandhi setting April 9 for its workers to spread the message of communal harmony.

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Modi announced the protest schedule while addressing the BJP parliamentary party meeting in the morning. Post-noon, the Congress began discussing it after the BJP made it clear the Grand Old Party would be in its crosshairs. The Congress formally announced its counter-protest plan in the evening.

The last day of the session ended within minutes as ruckus continued in the well. In all, the second half of the Budget session had a productivity rate of just 4% in the Lok Sabha and 8% in the Rajya Sabha as against 134% and 96% respectively for the first half of the session.

Both sides played their own little games, as the issue of special category status to Andhra Pradesh came to a boil wth YSR Congress and TDP serving no-confidence notices. The ruckus helped the treasury benches avoid the no-trust motion.

With Monday’s massive Dalit agitation in the North and Central India dominating the political discourse, Modi also tasked the party MPs with spending a night each in the villages of the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes between April 14 and May 5.

Likewise, Rahul Gandhi directed his party to hold fasts in district headquarters, while describing Monday’s violence as unfortunate. Dalits had hit the streets over the alleged reading down of the SC/ST Act by the Supreme Court.

In the evening, Modi, while interacting with district presidents of the BJP and workers of five Lok Sabha constituencies, said the “opposition to the BJP is now at its peak”.