By PTI
NEW DELHI: As many as 18 Lok Sabha members, including 10 from the ruling BJP, did not take part in the Question Hour proceedings on Monday though their names were listed for posing questions to ministers.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a BJP parliamentary party meeting earlier this month had given a stern message to his party MPs to attend parliamentary proceedings regularly and said unless they changed themselves, changes were bound to come.
The 10 BJP MPs who did not take part in the Question Hour proceedings were party chief whip Rakesh Singh, Kripanath Mallah, the party’s West Bengal unit chief Sukanta Majumdar, Vinod Kumar Sonkar, Sanganna Amarappa, the party’s youth wing chief Tejasvi Surya, Sunil Kumar Singh, Raksha Khadse, P P Chaudhary and Sanjay Jaiswal.
Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla called the names of all these MPs during the Question Hour but they were not in the House.
Only two BJP MPs — Rajendra Agrawal and Gopal Shetty — whose questions were listed for the day participated in the proceedings.
Eight MPs of opposition parties — two members each from the Shiv Sena, DMK and the Congress and one member each from the TMC and the VCK — also did not participate in the Question Hour proceedings as their respective parties were protesting in the House.
Members of the TMC and the Congress were protesting in the Well of the House demanding sacking of Union minister Ajay Mishra over the Lakhimpur Kheri violence, while the DMK was raising the issue of arrest of 55 fishermen from Tamil Nadu by Sri Lankan Navy.
Despite the absence of the members, Lok Sabha took up all 20 listed questions and supplementaries to various questions during the Question Hour on Monday, a record that has been created only twice before — on March 14, 1972 and on November 27, 2019.
Out of the 20 questions, replies to 15 were tabled on the floor of the House and no supplementary or explanation was sought.
