'Exposed BJP's “agenda-less” Parliament session', says Congress

|HT|

A day after a tumultuous monsoon session concluded, the Congress on Tuesday claimed that it exposed the Bharatiya Janata Party-led central government’s “agenda-less” Parliament session, and slammed the party for “not raising important issues” in both the Houses.

The BJP “ran away” by ending the monsoon session four days before the scheduled date, the ‘grand old party’ claimed. Notably, the Parliament was adjourned sine die on Monday with an emotional farewell to outgoing Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu, who was also the Rajya Sabha chairman.

“The Congress wanted to table the rising unemployment issue, followed by the Agnipath scheme. There have been meetings between India and China on border disputes for nearly 16 times and today the Indian Army cannot patrol along the border. The BJP wanted to run away from discussing such matters,” Congress’ Lok Sabha MP Gaurav Gogoi said.

He claimed that the BJP was exposed when they “had no answers on price rise”.

“If you observe the Union finance minister’s response, she was seen talking on the Ukraine issue, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka crisis. She talked about history. But what steps did her government take, she had no answer on that,” Gogoi said.

He further alleged that members of Parliament get to hear threats instead of answers from Union ministers during question hours.

Congress’ Rajya Sabha MP Jairam Ramesh pointed out that the Centre mentioned during the all-party meeting earlier that around 32 bills would be introduced or passed during this year’s monsoon session. However, only seven bills in Lok Sabha and five in Rajya Sabha were passed through this session.

“We demanded discussions on 13 issues during the all-party meeting. Out of those, only one was discussed during the session and that too after a delay of two weeks,” he said.

Referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech where he mentioned productivity, the Congress leader said that “productivity has no meaning without accountability”.

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