The Legislative Assembly continued its run of witnessing walkouts by one opposition party or the other every day of the ongoing Budget session, with the DMDK and the DMK leaving in a huff on Monday.
Their loud protests were met with firm responses from Speaker P Dhanapal and House Leader O Panneerselvam. As soon as the Assembly business moved to the debate on the demand for grants of the Highways and Minor Ports Department, DMDK members were on their feet asking the Speaker to continue the convention of giving the principal opposition party the first crack at the government. This had come after the leaders of a number of parties had appealed to the Speaker on Friday to reconsider his decision to depart from the tradition. However, the Speaker once again declined the request.
Panneerselvam then accused the DMDK of intentionally staging a walk out every day despite being given more time to speak than any other party.
This comment and the Speaker’s refusal to allow a rebuttal prompted the DMDK members to walk out. The DMK, however, had a more historical animosity to clear out with the AIADMK. DMK House leader M K Stalin urged the Speaker to expunge a remark made by Housing and Urban Development Minister R Vaithilingam that DMK chief M Karunanidhi had dismissed the mid-day meal scheme in the 1980s as “a scheme for beggars”.
Vaithilingam had read out from the transcripts of a speech made by DMK’s Rahman Khan in the Assembly in 1983 in which he had viciously attacked the then MGR-led AIADMK government for the mid-day meal scheme as “making beggars out of people and making cooks out of teachers”.
Vaithilingam said this view, expressed by a DMK MLA in the House, meant this was the stand of the party and by extension the stand of its leader. The DMK members left in a huff after Dhanapal refused to have both the initial comment and the explanation removed from the record.
