Making a last ditch effort, Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) on Monday “vehemently” urged the President Ram Nath Kovind not to grant his assent to the farmers’ bills passed by the Parliament, claiming that these “endanger the very survival of farmers and other farm related labour and trade”.
“The farmers came to the country’s rescue when the country needed them. Today, it is the country that must come to their rescue,” said the memorandum submitted by the SAD delegation, led by party president Sukhbir Singh Badal.
The Akali leaders urged him to “act as the nation’s conscience keeper and the custodian of the Constitution” and come to the rescue of farmers, farm and mandi labour and farm traders.
“The party has taken the farmers’ cause to the highest level in the country. The Core Committee of the party would meet soon to decide the next course of action to take the struggle for justice to the next level. But we will stand by the farmers every inch of the way forward,” said Sukhbir after meeting the president, adding that SAD is a “farmers’ party and 95 percent of our members are farmers”.
Sukhbir warned that “ignoring the farmers’ sentiments can have the potential to disturb social harmony and peace in the country”.
He said that the party has asked the President to heed the sentiments of millions and millions of beleaguered farmers, farm and mandi labourers, arhtiyas and Dalits represented here through us and to act on the basis of these sentiments and send the concerned Bills back to the Parliament for reconsideration.
The memorandum submitted by SAD also asked the President “to advise the Government to send these Bills to a Select Committee of Parliamentarians which could then take the stakeholders on board before presenting these bills to the Parliament again”.
The memorandum also highlighted how the ruling party “used its huge majority in the Parliament to bypass the time-honoured democratic traditions of taking the Opposition and allies into confidence and building a national consensus on critical issues”.
“This has cast a dark shadow on our democratic traditions as it short-circuited the accepted norms, procedures and conventions of parliamentary democracy. It was a sad day for democracy,” said the memorandum.The memorandum further said that “issues at stake required in-depth consideration as the concerned bills for legislation have a strong bearing on the vital and sensitive interests of the stakeholders — the farmers, the khet and Mandi mazdoors , the Arhtiyas and the Dalits”.
These segments constitute over 65 percent of our country’s population, and the bills have an implication for even the remaining 35 percent as agriculture is the backbone of our entire economy, it added.
