Jaya alleges gag order on Opposition

Chennai: AIADMK supremo and former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa on Saturday alleged her party was not being given enough time to speak in the Assembly.

Jayalalithaa, who attended the Assembly, accused the ruling DMK Government of "digging a grave for democracy" and said her request to speak for 95 minutes was not allowed.

Jayalalithaa, who had earlier announced that she would not attend the house regularly fearing "insults" from the ruling party, had decided to be in the house following suspension of all her party MLAs yesterday.

The Opposition was "being completely ignored" as she had been denied permission to speak instead of the opposition leader O Paneerselvam in the slot allotted to him on May 30, she claimed.

She said during the previous AIADMK regime, when DMK leader K Anbazhagan was the opposition leader, two other DMK leaders, Durai Murugan and Arcot Veersamy had been allowed to speak in his absence.

Jayalalithaa accused DMK of "misleading people" on the anti-conversion law.

"In 1985, a five Judge constitutional bench of the Supreme Court had ruled that an Ordinance was enough to repeal a law and consent of the house was not required. Going by this the anti-conversion law already ceased to exist. The DMK had brought this up during its election campaign and a suitable reply had been given at that time itself," she said.

On the waiver of Cooperative bank loans to the tune of nearly Rs 7,000 crore, Jayalalithaa wanted to know why agriculture loans from the nationalised and commercial banks were not being waived. Such a waiver involved an additional Rs 7,000 crore and it would be only "just" to exempt farmers from these loans also, she said.

She also demanded that the farmers who had already remitted their loan amounts to the tune of about Rs 500 crore be reimbursed.

On the issue of allotment of two acres of land to landless poor, she wanted to know whether any enumeration had been done.

When her government was implementing "Uzhavar Padugappu thittam" (Farmers protection scheme), an enumeration had revealed that there were 86 lakh landless agriculture workers.

"Providing each of them two acres will mean 1.72 crore acres of land, which is not available in whole of Tamil Nadu," she said.

When she raised this matter in the house, the DMK members accused her of wrong statistics and "laughed it off," she claimed.

The government had promised to distribute 55 lakh acres of land to 27.5 lakh landless agriculture families in the state.