Stalin’s Stern Warning To Union BJP government
The Prime Minister had even refused to meet and discuss the issue with Members of Parliament: Reports
CHENNAI: Issuing a stern warning to the Union BJP government over the delimitation exercise that it had been planning clandestinely to carry out through a special session of Parliament on April 16 without taking other parties into confidence, Chief Minister M K Stalin said if it harmed Tamil Nadu in any way, the entire state would come out to the streets in protest under his leadership.
In a video message put on Tuesday, Stalin took the pledge on the birth anniversary of B R Ambedkar to fight it out against the move to push through a Constitutional amendment on delimitation at the forcibly convened session of Parliament just ahead of the elections in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal and said the Union Government’s action lacked clarity and hence caused suspicion.
Clarifying that MPs from DMK would attend the session, he warned that if the amendment was detrimental to the interest of the State, Tamil Nadu would not keep quiet and every family would take to the streets in a manner that every State took note of it by creating a situation that would be reminiscent of the 1950s and 60s.
Accusing the Union Government of attempting to bulldoze the amendment without any consultation or providing clarity, he said the hurried attempt to push through the amendment was a blatant assault on democracy and a direct attack on the rights of the States.
The southern States were highly concerned about the process as the Union Government had not shared details of it with the opposition parties on how the exercise would be conducted, raising suspicions of a grave danger lurking behind it, he said.
He said that repeated attempts by the opposition to get clarification from Prime Minister Narendra Modi had failed and there had been no response to the request for an assurance that the south Indian States that complied with the Union Government’s directives on population control were not penalized for their exemplary performance on promoting family planning.
The Prime Minister had even refused to meet and discuss the issue with Members of Parliament, he said and added even after senior Congress leader Sonia Gandhi raised similar concerns, the government was refusing to clarify its position.
Stalin told the government that it would not be allowed to carry out the delimitation clandestinely and asserted that the rights of States mattered more than electoral considerations.
