With the fifth and last day of the Assembly monsoon on Saturday meeting with the same fate as the earlier four days when an adamant opposition refused to allow any business to be transacted without their demands being first taken up, the brief session (the tenth session of the 13th Andhra Pradesh Legislative Assembly) ended as a complete washout.
The Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), the Bharatiya Janata Party and the CPI stalled the proceedings pressing their demand for passing a resolution on Telangana. The main opposition party, the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) too appeared in no mood to let the House conduct its business and disrupted the proceedings from the word go.
Speaker Nadendla Manohar had to adjourn the House three times before he finally adjourned it sine die and left the chair in a huff amid slogan shouting by all the opposition members. The House was adjourned at 9.15 am, 10.40 am, 12.15 pm and finally sine die at 1.30 pm.
The day began with the Speaker disallowing the various adjournment motions moved by opposition parties on issues like a resolution on separate Telangana, drought, viral fevers in tribal areas, open cast mining problem in Adilabad and filling of vacant posts in police department.
The TRS members along with independent MLA N Janardhan Reddy trooped into the Well of the House holding placards and raising ‘Jai Telangana’ slogans demanding that the House pass a resolution for a separate Telangana state. The BJP and CPI members too rose to their feet. On the other hand, a few Congress MLAs mocked at the agitating members by raising ‘Jai Andhra’ slogans.
Some TDP MLAs, meanwhile, staged a sit-in near the Speaker’s podium demanding that the government release water to Krishna delta. They alleged that water was not being released to the delta despite the Srisailam and Nagarjunasagar dams having adequate levels of water.
Minister for legislative affairs D Sridhar Babu and government chief whip G Venkata Ramana Reddy appealed to the protesting members to let the House run as it was the last day of the monsoon session and certain Bills had to be passed and issues like power and drought had to be taken up for discussion. However, their pleas fell on deaf ears.
The opposition members, however, allowed the Speaker to pass a “condolence motion” mourning the death of former members M Damodar Reddy, V Veerabhadra Rao, E. Devaiah, BV Mohan Reddy, K Ramachandra Raju, A Hanumanth Reddy and R Sadasiva Rao.