[caption id="attachment_259533" align="aligncenter" width="500"]
Congress members walk out of the Lok Sabha in a protest over Karnataka issues, during the Budget Session of Parliament, in New Delhi on Tuesday.[/caption]
New Delhi, July 9 (IANS): Major opposition parties, including the Congress and the DMK, on Tuesday stormed out of the Lok Sabha over the political crisis in Karnataka where several Congress and JD-S MLAs have quit, putting the coalition government in a crisis.
The House was plunged into an uproar when a Congress request to raise the issue during Zero Hour was not allowed by Speaker Om Birla.
Congress and DMK MPs immediately trooped near the Speaker’s podium raising slogans like “we want justice” and “stop dictatorship”. Congress leaders, who persisted with their demand, first protested from their seats.
The Speaker pointed out that he had allowed the Congress on Monday to speak on the issue. “But don’t give out an impression outside Parliament that it is a place for sloganeering and showing placards.”
The Speaker, who had earlier warned the members amid protests, urged them to take their seats, adding that he had been giving opportunities to members to speak out of turn.
Birla said the House belonged to all members and there should not be any sloganeering. “Debate with each other but there is a need to put an end to sloganeering and raising of placards if everyone agrees.”
He said the proceedings of the House were widely watched and the members should not resort to sloganeering.
Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury hit out at the government and asked it to stop “poaching politics.”
The Congress has accused the BJP of destabilizing the Congress-JD-S coalition government in Karnataka by luring its MLAs to cross over to the BJP.
“The opposition has a major role in taking forward the country... We will raise the issue. It is the government’s prerogative to take the decision. We are doing our job. Poaching politics should be stopped,” Chowdhury said.
He also alleged that after Karnataka, the ruling party could next target the Congress government in Madhya Pradesh.
The MP justified the Congress resorting to sloganeering by referring to the remarks of BJP leader Arun Jaitley that disruption was also a legitimate strategy of the opposition.
“We are fulfilling our role, they should fulfil theirs. Senior leader Arun Jaitley has said disruption is also a tactic, we have taken a lesson from him,” he said.
Chowdhury said “democracy was in danger” due to the actions of the BJP-led government and reiterated that “poaching politics should be stopped.”
Rejecting the BJP’s claims of non-interference in the Karnataka developments, he asked how vehicles and planes were ready for rebel legislators.
Amid Congress protests, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Pralhad Joshi said the members cannot give notice on a matter that had already been raised in the House.
He said the BJP does not have a hand in the Karnataka developments and the Congress was facing problems due to the resignation of Rahul Gandhi as the party president.
Joshi said Congress members had raised the issue of the political crisis faced by their coalition government on Monday and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh had responded to it.
Before the government could respond on the issue, Congress, DMK, NCP and National Conference members trooped out of the House.
But other opposition parties like the Trinamool Congress and the BSP did not join the walk out, displaying disunity among non-BJP ranks.
It was the first time in the 17th Lok Sabha that the Congress staged a walkout.
The Union Cabinet is likely to consider on Wednesday a bill which seeks to define transgenders and prohibit discrimination against them.
Passage of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, which aims at empowering the community by defining and protecting their rights, is one of the priorities of the Social Justice and Empowerment ministry in the first 100 days agenda of the second term of the Narendra Modi government, an official source said.
The bill was passed by Lok Sabha in December 2018.
The draft bill without any new amendments has been taken back to the Cabinet for approval again, the sources said.
According to the bill, a transgender is a person whose “gender does not match with the gender assigned to that person at birth and includes trans-man or trans-woman (whether or not such person has undergone Sex Reassignment Surgery or hormone therapy or laser therapy or such other therapy), person with intersex variations, gender- queer and person having such socio-cultural identities as kinner, hijra, aravani and jogta.”
Going by the bill, a person would have the right to choose to be identified as a man, woman or transgender,
Irrespective of sex reassignment surgery and hormonal therapy. It also requires transgender persons to go through a district magistrate and “district screening committee” to get certified as a transperson.
The committee would comprise a medical officer, a psychologist or psychiatrist, a district welfare officer, a government official, and a transgender person.
The bill prohibits discrimination against a transgender person in areas such as education, employment, and healthcare. It directs the central and state governments to provide welfare schemes in these areas.
Offences like compelling a transgender person to beg, denial of access to a public place, physical and sexual abuse, etc. would attract up to two years’ imprisonment and a fine.
The bill has drawn criticism of the stakeholders who say it lays out a bureaucratic procedure to be followed for legal gender recognition, which violates the right of the people belonging to the community to have their self-identified gender recognised.
The bill was also termed regressive by members of the community who said it criminalises “begging”, which has long been the primary source of income for many of them. According to the community members it would take away their source of living without offering an alternative.
