SAD’s Bathinda MP and former Union minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal on Tuesday condemned the Union government for scrapping the winter session of Parliament, stating that the government was running away from its responsibility to resolve the grievances of farmers by repealing the three farm laws. She demanded that a special one-day session be held at the earliest to repeal the three laws as per the wishes of the farming community.
She said, “the Centre knows that it is in the wrong. It knows it has legislated on agriculture which is a state subject and that farmers of all states have rejected the three acts it bulldozed through in the last session. It knows it cannot face the people on this issue and that it is why it has invented the excuse of Covid-19 to cancel the winter session of Parliament.”
Terming the move as a murder of democracy, Badal said that parliamentarians have been denied an opportunity to raise the voice of the farmers. “The farmers are suffering untold hardship in biting cold wave conditions and parliamentarians wanted to highlight this. They also wanted to put pressure on the government to repeal the three farm laws which have been rejected by the farmers. There is no reason to keep laws in force which the people don’t want,” she added. “Adequate safety precautions can be taken for a special one-day Parliament session to repeal the laws and the government should not make any excuses on this score,” asserted Badal
She said that the Congress should not adopt double standards. Badal said that while Punjab CM Amarinder Singh was toeing the Centre’s line and asking farmers to lift their dharna and a majority of Congress MPs were oblivious to the suffering of the farmers, four Congress MPs were indulging in a sit-in at Delhi to befool the farmers.