Bhopal: The state's principal opposition, the Congress party, will be moving a breach of privilege motion in the Vidhan Sabha for, what it has described as, "a conspiracy hatched by three senior officers of the health department at the instance of 'unknown forces' to get the three-day session of the House from December 28-30, 2020, postponed."
The notice for the motion, signed by the leader of opposition in the Vidhan Sabha, Kamal Nath, and party MLAs Dr Govind Singh, NP Prajapati, Sajjan Singh Verma, PC Sharma and Praveen Pathak, says that the additional chief secretary, Health and Family Welfare Mohammed Suleman, Commissioner, Health Services, Dr Sanjay Goyal and CMHO, Bhopal, Dr Prabhakar Tiwari "scripted and executed the conspiracy; provided fabricated and misleading information and deliberately concealed some relevant facts."
“We’ve got detailed evidence which strongly suggests that the claim that a large number of Vidhan Sabha staffers had tested positive for Covid-19 was false. The session was postponed by fudging the numbers,” PC Sharma said.
The session was postponed on December 27, following an all-party meeting, which was attended among others, by the Protem Speaker Rameshwar Sharma, CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Kamal Nath.
While Rameshwar Sharma and home minister Narottam Mishra had claimed that the decision was taken by consensus, it has been learnt that former parliamentary affairs minister Dr Govind Singh had vehemently opposed the postponement of the session.
Dr Govind Singh, while opposing the move, had said at the meeting that when farmers' conclaves with over 10,000 in attendance were being organised by ruling BJP in various districts of the state, why the Vidhan Sabha session of three days can't be held.
At the all-party meeting, ACS Mohammad Suleman had given a detailed presentation about the COVID-19 situation in Bhopal and Indore.
He had told the meeting that out of the 271 employees of the Vidhan Sabha, eight were found positive, while out of the 281 tests conducted at the MLAs' Rest House, 67 staff had tested positive, which means a 'very high' 23% positivity rate.
The notice for privilege motion says that the persons who were shown to be positive weren't Vidhan Sabha staffers but labourers working at the MLAs Rest House. They were declared positive on the basis of the rather untrustworthy Rapid Antigen Test and most of them tested negative subsequently in RTPCR Test. Only one woman employee of the Vidhan Sabha had tested positive and she, too, tested negative in RTPCR Test.
Moreover, despite the alleged high incidence of COVID-19 in the MLAs Rest House, the area was not declared a containment zone.
"A big fraud has been committed and we’ll expose it,” Sharma said.
