The opposition BJP, which had been boycotting and disrupting Assembly session for the past few days over "derogatory and insulting" remarks by Virbhadra Singh, today said party MLAs would not attend the proceedings till the Chief Minister apologised.
BJP general secretary Randhir Sharma said, "The Chief Minister is making derogatory statements to provoke the BJP... and due to his utterances, we decided to boycott the budget speech and how can we participate in discussions on budget presented by him unless he apologises publicly for his comments."
The BJP members disrupted the Governor's address, boycotted the budget speech, did not participate in debate of motion of thanks on the Governor's address and now its participation in budget discussion from February 10 to 13 seems unlikely.
It is for the first time that the BJP did not participate in the proceedings of the House on all five days and even disrupted the Question Hour.
Sharma also slammed the budget for 2014-15 presented in the House by the Chief Minister yesterday, and said that it was "anti-development and anti-growth" and mere statement of expenditure without any reference to resource mobilisation.
There has been meagre increase in budget and annual plan and in fact the capital expenditure has come down.
The increase in plan was just Rs 300 crore which is 7.3 per cent while the total increase in budget as compared to the current year was about 8 per cent which was much less than the annual increase during the BJP regime.
He accused the government of backtracking on the issue of granting unemployment allowance to the youth and dubbed the "skill development allowance scheme" as a ploy to deny unemployment allowance to youths.
He expressed surprise that the there was no direction or mention of strategies to curb inflation and rein in the spiralling prices, affecting the common man.
"The BJP has decided to raise the issue of corruption inside and outside the House and changing the strategy every day is part of our strategy," he added.
