The 19th Assembly session of the LDF government, the prolonged Budget session that was scheduled till April 8, has been guillotined on Friday in the wake of COVID-19. The opposition called this both unprecedented and anti-democratic, and said the move would induce nothing but fear.
Speaker P Sreeramakrishnan rushed through the proceedings and passed the full Budget on Friday itself. The full Budget was scheduled to be passed on March 30, a day before the start of the 2020-21 fiscal, after discussions related to the performance of all government departments were completed. Discussions related to nine more departments, including Health, were to be held in the coming days. The Budget session began on March 2. The decision to guillotine the session was taken at the Business Advisory Committee meeting held inside the Assembly on Friday.
Opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala told Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan not to run away from the Assembly. “We are not against temporarily ending the session. But let us pass the Vote on Account for three months up to July and reconvene later to carry on with the discussions,” Chennithala said. Other opposition leaders like K C Joseph and P T Thomas said that the assemblies of other states and the Lok Sabha were still in session. “This will only cause further panic,” Thomas said.
The chief minister said the decision to end the session was taken after such a demand came from many quarters. “Muslim League MLA K N A Khader was the first to sent a letter to the speaker saying it would be unethical to go on with the session when COVID-19 threat was looming large. Then P C George made an emotional appeal to end the session. I also got calls from many people,” the chief minister said.
Tongue firmly in cheek, Muneer said it was strange that the chief minister was so respectful of Khader's opinion but was indifferent to Khader's leader in the House. Muneer is the League's parliamentary party leader.
The opposition can go to town saying the government was trying to avoid facing tough questions, but sources point out another reason why the government had refused to postpone the session. “After the LDF came to power, the full budget was passed by the end of March allowing development works to begin from the first day of the new fiscal. Earlier, the Vote on Account is passed to meet emergency expenses for the first three months of the fiscal and then the full Budget would be passed only by around May or even July. This had considerably delayed the plan process, leading to gross underutilisation of plan expenditure. If the Budget was not passed now, it would have delayed development activities,” a top government source said.
However, such an argument was not put forward by the chief minister in the Assembly on Friday.
Parliamentary Affairs Minister A K Balan countered the opposition contention that such an arbitrary cancellation of a Budget session was unheard of in the history of Kerala Assembly. "This had happened in 2013 during Oommen Chandy," Balan said. "Then, there was no virus scare either," he added.
Chennithala said the session had to be called off after the LDF opposition had vandalised the Assembly and even pushed down the speaker's chair. "The speaker could not have functioned in that dreadful atmosphere," Muneer said, and added: "But is the present speaker in any way threatened."
COVID-19, which stands for Coronavirus Disease 2019, is the name of the disease caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2. SARS-CoV-2 belongs to the Coronavirus family with crown-shaped spikes on its surfaces. The name of the disease was given by the World Health Organisation.
