AIADMK general secretary and Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly, Jayalalithaa, on Wednesday said that DMK Ministers and MLAs often interrupted her speech in the House on Monday and humiliated her.
“No Leader of Opposition has been humiliated to this extent in the history of the Legislative Assembly,” she said. This had been going on for the past four years since the DMK had come to power.
She said the Ministers and MLAs could not tolerate the fact that she was pointing out faults in government schemes and its administrative inefficiency. In a statement here, she said the Ministers were interrupting on flimsy pretexts, contravening all established rules of conduct of the House and tradition. They repeatedly tried to trivialise matters with pointless references to her stays in Kodanad and Hyderabad.
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Pointing out that it was a tradition to greet the Speaker with folded hands, she said that she had greeted him when she entered the House and when she was leaving. The Speaker did not reciprocate the greeting because he feared Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi. One could not expect such a Speaker to conduct the House in an impartial manner.
Ms. Jayalalithaa complained that Information Minister Parithi Elamvazhuthi had forgotten that he was a Minister and used unparliamentary words during his interventions. Ministers K. Ponmudy and Durai Murugan and MLAs interrupted her speech with the intention of deflecting attention from the issues she had raised during the debate. The Speaker did not intervene and restore order in the House at any point.
When she had spoken in connection with the killing of a police Sub-Inspector in Tirunelveli and condemned the inaction of the Ministers who were present there, the Speaker expunged a portion of the speech. When she had raised this issue, a Minister raised the deaths in a stampede during Mahamakam, when she was Chief Minister. Ms. Jayalalithaa said that when the Mahamakam incident took place, she was not at that spot. It was a stampede and there was no parallel to the situation in Tirunelveli.
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Ms. Jayalalithaa said she was a compassionate person and, if she was at that spot, would have certainly helped in any manner she could have. She recalled that when the tsunami hit, she had personally visited all the affected areas and consoled the affected, apart from ensuring immediate relief.
After the MGR Nagar school stampede too, she had visited the area and had consoled the affected.