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| Seven sittings, full-blown fight: NC-BJP clash over Assembly session length | | | Sanjay Pandita
Early Times Report
Jammu, Sept 15: The battle lines are drawn even before the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly convenes, with the ruling National Conference and the Opposition BJP locking horns over the length of the upcoming Autumn Session — the BJP calling it a "mockery of democracy," and Chief Minister Omar Abdullah dismissing the charge as political theatre.
Leader of Opposition Sunil Sharma, the BJP MLA from Paddar-Nagsani, fired the first salvo at a press conference in Jammu, declaring that Omar Abdullah's government had "almost completely lost its legislative accountability" and reduced the Assembly to "a joke."
His central grievance: with the session confined to just seven sittings — and, by his calculation, only five substantive ones once ceremonial and procedural business is stripped away — legislators would have little real room to raise the concerns of the people who elected them.
"The Assembly is the platform where people's issues can be raised and taken up with the elected government, but unfortunately, the ruling National Conference is not ready to take up people's issues," Sharma charged, demanding the House be convened for at least a month instead.
He appealed directly to the Speaker to reconsider and extend the sitting to roughly 30 days, insisting the Assembly remains "the only institutional platform available to elected representatives" to press public grievances. Sharma also turned his fire on the Business Advisory Committee, questioning whether it was fulfilling its mandate of properly scheduling the session's business.
Omar Abdullah was quick to hit back. Responding to Sharma's broadside, the Chief Minister pointed out that several BJP-ruled states have themselves held Assembly sessions far shorter than the one now under attack, and suggested the Leader of Opposition audit his own party's record before lecturing the NC-led government.
He added that the Assembly would sit from morning to evening through the scheduled dates, leaving little room for the "not serious" tag Sharma had tried to pin on it.
Per the provisional calendar issued by the Assembly Secretariat, the ten-day Autumn Session will run in Srinagar from September 21 to September 30, covering government business, private members' bills and resolutions.
Three days will remain non-sitting — September 23 (Maharaja Hari Singh's birthday), September 26 (a designated off day), and September 27 (Sunday) — leaving seven working sittings, though the calendar remains subject to change based on the volume of business listed before the House. |
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