On the first day of the winter session of Parliament, which began on December 4, the Leader of the Congress in Lok Sabha, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, raised the issue of the death sentence against eight former Indian navy officers by a court in Qatar and demanded that the government must exhaust every resource to bring them back.
As the House began its sitting, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was greeted with slogans of “Teesri baar, Modi sarkar [Modi government for a third time]” after the party’s hat-trick win in the Assembly elections, results of which were declared on Sunday.
The much-anticipated report of the Ethics Committee on Trinamool member Mahua Moitra in the cash-for-query allegation was not tabled on Monday even though it was listed among papers that would be placed before the House. At the Business Advisory Committee (BAC) of the Lok Sabha, Opposition leaders are learnt to have told Speaker Om Birla that the report should not be tabled without giving a chance to Ms. Moitra to give her version.
The first hour of the Lower House witnessed a brief disruption after BSP MP Danish Ali protested against “inaction” on his complaint against BJP’s Ramesh Bidhuri for allegedly making communal slurs at him.
When the House resumed at noon, Mr. Chowdhury raised the issue of eight former Indian Navy officials sentenced to death by a court in Qatar, and said, “The government must exhaust every resource it has to bring them back.”
Congress member from Punjab, Manish Tewari, too, had given an adjournment notice on the same issue but it wasn’t admitted.
The Indian nationals were handed the death sentence by Qatar’s Court of First Instance on October 26. But an appeal has already been filed in a higher Qatari court that has admitted the plea.
