UPA govt comes under attack left, right and centre

BJP to bring privilege motion against PM, Left to raise airports privatisation issue

The UPA government must be relieved that the post-recess Budget session is short. The Opposition BJP and the Left allies will effectively have only about a week to raise the issues that they have identified to put the government in the dock in the Parliament.

The BJP is preparing to move a privilege motion against Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for allegedly misleading the Parliament on the Indo-US nuclear deal, according to BJP Deputy Leader in Lok Sabha VK Malhotra.

To this end, the party is said to be collecting and compiling material including testimony by US officials before the Senate and the Foreign Relation Committee of the House of Representative on the deal.

BJP leaders claimed the PM's statement in the Parliament before the recess was to be the blueprint for Indo-US negotiations, but the GoI gave much more to the US.

And this is not all. Terming UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi's letter to the PM on Free Trade Agreements as "public humiliation", the party today demanded his resignation and asked the government to make public both the letters and the pacts signed so far. "Such exchange of letters wherein Sonia Gandhi has cautioned the PM against the FTAs, are unprecedented, mysterious and beyond our understanding. Gandhi could have conveyed her reservations over telephone also. It is a public humiliation of the PM by her," V K Malhotra said.

The Left parties, which met here today to decide their strategy in the Parliament, are no less aggressive against the UPA regime. They have decided to raise the issues of wheat imports, continuing suicides by farmers, privatisation of airports, displacement of tribals, price hike, violation of labour laws and Bills for women's reservation and unorganised sector workers, among others, in the Parliament.

On the office-of-profit (OoP) issue, however, they are very considerate of the government's moves. They re-iterated their stance that a committee should be set up to define the OoP and in the meantime, necessary measures taken to resolve the current crisis caused by petitions seeking disqualification of about 40 MPs, including 10 from the Left, for holding offices of profit.

Rejecting former PM Atal Behari Vajpayee's demand to abolish the National Advisory Council (NAC), CPI(M) Politburo member and MP Sitaram Yechury said that every government had advisory bodies and there was nothing wrong in it.

That is all the concessions the Left would extend to the UPA in this session of the Parliament. Reiterating the Left opposition to the government's decision to import wheat, Yechury linked it with the broader issue of agrarian crisis leading to suicides by farmers.

The National Common Minimum Programme (NCMP) had suggested two measures to address these problems - increase in public investment in agriculture and access to institutional credit to farmers. The Left parties are not satisfied with the government's performance on the first count.