New Delhi:
Two Aam Aadmi Party MPs today shouted slogans inside the Central Hall of Parliament against the farm laws. The commotion broke out when Prime Minister Narendra Modi was offering his tribute to former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee on his 96th birth anniversary.
AAP MP Sanjay Singh tweeted a video that showed him and his party colleague, Bhagwat Mann, raising slogans against the farm laws and holding up posters in protest inside the Central Hall. “Withdraw the anti-farmer ‘black laws’,” one of them says.
Several other MPs were seen in the video standing by as PM Modi finished paying tribute to Mr Vajpayee before his portrait. PM Modi was seen walking out after interacting with a few other leaders. The two AAP parliamentarians, meanwhile, continued to shout slogans.
“The parliament session is not being called. We’re not being given a chance to speak to the Prime Minister or put our points across to him. Today, during the programme in the Central Hall, Aam Aamdi Party MP Bhagwat Mann and I appealed for the ‘black law’ to be withdrawn. Lakhs of farmers are protesting. The new farm laws are in the hands of industrialists and against farmers. We support the agitation. Our appeal to the Prime Minister is, withdraw the three ‘black laws’,” Sanjay Singh told NDTV.
Mr Mann, the MP from Punjab’s Sangrur, tweeted in Hindi, “Pro-farmer slogans echoed in the Central Hall to open the closed eyes and ears of the Modi government (sic).”
Opposition parties, which tried to block the farm bills in parliament in September, had earlier requested President Ram Nath Kovind not to sign on the bills. The bills, they had said, were passed in the Rajya Sabha in an undemocratic manner. The President, however, had given his assent to all three bills.
On Thursday, a small group of Congress leaders, led by Rahul Gandhi, me the President and submitted a memorandum seeking his intervention for the withdrawal of the farm laws.
Thousands of farmers, who have braved water cannons, tear gas and police barricades, began their protest last month against the farm laws, aimed at doing away with middlemen and allowing them to sell produce anywhere in the country. Farmers say the laws will deprive them of the minimum prices fixed by the government and leave them at the mercy of corporates.
