BJP MLAs resign en-masse from Jharkhand Assembly

The BJP MLAs have resigned en masse from the House on Wednesday demanding immediate dissolution of the House and hold early elections. Led by the state BJP president Raghubar Das and Lok Sabha MPs Yashwant Sinha and Arjun Munda, all 22 MLAs submitted their resignation letters to the Assembly Speaker Alamgir Alam.

Prior to reaching the Assembly, the MLAs went to the state secretariat and called on the Governor, K Sankaranarayanan, and submitted a two-page memorandum demanding dissolution of the Assembly immediately and take steps to hold early elections.

The BJP state president also submitted a bunch of letters of the MLAs to the Governor and requested him to forward them to the Speaker. In the 82-member House, the BJP at present has 22 legislators out of current strength of 63 MLAs. The resignation of the MLAs will reduce the strength to 41, exactly half of the original strength.

Jharkhand is currently under President’s Rule and the Assembly under ‘suspended animation’. The President’s Rule in Jharkhand was promulgated on January 19 this year after the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) supremo Sibu Soren resigned as chief minister after his defeat in Tamar Assembly by-poll.

Meanwhile, Union minister for food processing industries and the Ranchi MP, Subodh Kant Sahai, have termed the en-masse resignation of BJP legislators from the suspended Assembly as ‘political gimmick and farce’.

The minister said that the Jharkhand Assembly was in suspended animation for nearly eight months and they could have resigned earlier. They had chosen the time when the state administration under the leadership of the Governor was fighting the drought.