Opposition boycotts Rajya Sabha Business Advisory Committee meeting

Opposition alliance INDIA on Thursday boycotted a meeting of the Business Advisory Committee (BAC) of the Rajya Sabha to protest Prime Minister Narendra Modi not making a statement on Manipur violence in Parliament, a senior leader said.

The Rajya Sabha BAC has 11 members, including the Vice-President who is its ex-officio chairman.

Three MPs from the 26-member opposition front INDIA are on the BAC committee -- Jairam Ramesh (Congress), Misa Bharti (RJD) and Derek O'Brien (TMC). They and BRS's Keshav Rao gave the meeting a miss.

This was the latest in a slew of meetings that members of the opposition bloc either walked out of or boycotted over the last few weeks.

Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla on Thursday met some leaders of political parties as he worked on deciding the date on which the debate on the no-confidence motion will be held.

Parliamentary sources said a decision will be taken later.

On Wednesday and Thursday, some opposition members in the Lok Sabha objected to the government bringing bills on substantive policy matters at a time when a no-confidence motion is already admitted.

The Chair had said the speaker has to decide the date of the debate within 10 days and had rejected their objections.

On Wednesday, opposition members walked out of a meeting of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology headed by Shiv Sena (Shinde) MP Prataprao Jhadav opposing the adoption of a report on the new Personal Data Protection Bill.

They argued that the bill was never formally referred to the committee and that a report cannot be framed based on informal discussions.

The draft report was circulated on the eve of the meeting and the members argued that none of them were told that such a report was in the works. Amid high drama, seven opposition MPs and eight MPs from the BJP and allied parties engaged in a bitter exchange for nearly an hour.

BJP MP Nishikant Dubey proposed a vote to break the deadlock, the point at which opposition members -- CPI(Marxist)'s John Brittas, Congress' Karti P Chidambaram, TMC MPs Jawahar Sircar and Mohua Moitra, among others -- walked out. Brittas moved a dissent note too. The report was adopted in their absence.

On July 20, opposition leaders walked out of a BAC meeting in protest against Modi not making a statement on the Manipur issue in Parliament and the Centre bringing a bill to replace an ordinance on the control of services in Delhi despite it being sub-judice.

Leaders of the Congress and other opposition parties including the Left, TMC, DMK, RJD, NCP, and AAP walked out of the meeting as their protest in writing was not accepted by the chairman.

On Wednesday, the Congress moved a no-confidence motion against the government in Lok Sabha on behalf of the INDIA alliance to force PM Modi to speak on the ethnic violence in Manipur in which more than 160 people have been killed since May.