If you are one who believes that a girl child is unwanted only in poor and illiterate families, a personal experience narrated by the former Congress Minister Motamma in the Legislative Council last week should be an eye-opener.
Participating in a discussion on female foeticide, Ms. Motamma said she, too, was under pressure after her first child, a daughter, was born. “The second time, when I was carrying twins, I spent sleepless nights for six months. I had even told my husband that he can go ahead and remarry if the babies turned out to be girls.” She had twin boys.
She went on to say, “At that time, I had told my husband that if he deserted us [the first daughter and the presumed twin girls], I could bring my daughters up singly, may be by taking up a teaching job.”
The veteran politician had a word of advice for women with regard to the girl child: “We should take a firm decision and not succumb to any kind of pressure from in-laws or husband.” Recounting a contrasting experience, the BJP’s Vimala Gowda said she sometimes wept alone as she did not have daughters.
The discussion ended on a lighter note when Tara, Umashree, Ms. Motamma and other women members quickly jumped in and good-humouredly ribbed Ms. Gowda, beseeching her to adopt.
Dusty politics
A favourite refrain of the former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda ever since he was voted out of power in 1997 – rather befitting of his tag of ‘ mannina maga’ [or farmer] – has been: “I shall rise again from dust and prove my detractors wrong.” Last week, it somewhat came true when he was inaugurating a makeshift shed that would house the new party office next to Krishna Flour Mill.
His news conference on the vacant plot was engulfed in dust because of the ongoing civil works. Recalling the famous statement he had made in the Lok Sabha 18 years ago, Mr. Gowda told the scribes present there in a lighter vein, “When I resigned as Prime Minister, I had vowed that I would rise from dust. I still don’t know what inspired me to say it. Right now, not only am I sitting in dust because of the situation, I have made you also consume dust.”
When Speaker
irks ex-Speaker
An argument with Speaker Kagodu Thimmappa over drinking water crisis in Kolar and Chickballapur district has apparently left the former Speaker and Congress MLA K.R. Ramesh Kumar with bitter feelings. Mr. Kumar posted on his Facebook page, “I am yet to recover from this…. I am of the belief that time will heal all such wounds.”
The debate in the Legislative Assembly took an ugly turn when Mr. Thimmappa took objection to the actions of Mr. Kumar and JD (S) MLA Manjunath Gowda; the two protested and dared the Speaker to remove them from the House.
Mr. Kumar had been unhappy since the State Budget, ostensibly over the government’s ‘callousness and indifference’ over omitting certain pressing issues that he had requested to be included in the budget.
Two days after the argument with the Speaker, Mr. Kumar tendered his resignation to three House committees – the estimates committee, the committee to probe power purchase by the previous government, and the committee to control illegal sand extraction. These committees come under the administrative jurisdiction of the Speaker. Mr. Kumar further said, “I will continue to hold on only to the office of MLA because my people have bestowed the honour on me. I have only public interest in my heart and mind.”
Explaining this, he said, “I have done this to express my resentment against the treatment meted out to me by the Speaker. My friends and well-wishers were surprised by my silence and my absence from the Assembly. I don’t know how long this impasse will continue but my determination has grown stronger and my resolve to fight has increased. I am sure that this is a temporary phase and better days are on the anvil,” Mr. Kumar’s post said.
Wasn’t it only a few days before that Mr. Kumar spoke on the budget and offered his suggestions?
Carry-over projects
What would be the best analogy for the enormously slow pace of irrigation projects in the State? It depends on which prism you would use to look at it.
In the Legislative Assembly the other day, opposition BJP commented that the government lacked the commitment to complete them and called the projects a non-starter.
The ruling party’s Basavaraja Rayareddy chose to qualify the label as ‘carry-overs’ – a system, like in colleges, adopted by Water Resources Minister M.B. Patil, who incidentally heads a few educational institutions. Mr. Rayareddy said that like the carry-over system where students failing in a subject keep taking the paper forward into the succeeding years until they finally pass, “the Minister will definitely carry over all projects to the last year of the government.” To which the BJP’s Laxman Savadi went a step ahead to say irrigation projects actually needed a push-start as in the case of motor vehicles.
Afshan Yasmeen,
Muralidhara Khajane, and
Nagesh Prabhu
