NEW DELHI, 21 March 2005 — Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee yesterday stuck to his guns that one of the “basic features” of the country’s governance has been “violated” by the interim order of the Supreme Court in the Jharkhand case.

He warned that if the issues were not sorted out, it would upset the constitutional balance. “The issues arising out of the interim order of the case are of such far-reaching ambit that if not reconsidered and if followed in future, it will upset the constitutional balance and the democratic functioning of the state as a whole,” Chatterjee said.

Chatterjee made the remarks while inaugurating a conference of presiding officers of legislative bodies in the backdrop of the Jharkhand crisis, when the Supreme Court advanced the date for a trial of strength in the assembly and directed videotaping of the proceedings, which were strongly objected to by Chatterjee.

The conference was boycotted by presiding officers of states ruled by BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), a development on which Chatterjee declined to comment. BJP was not in favor of such a conference and had left it to the wisdom of speakers.

Speaker K. Kalimuthu of Tamil Nadu Assembly also did not attend the conference. Of the 18 speakers, 13 were absent from the meeting. While eight of them showed regret, five remained silent on the issue.

Congress saw nothing wrong in Speaker Chatterjee holding such a conference. “It is important to ascertain the powers of the judiciary. It is perfectly fine for the legislatures or any other organ to discuss. The speaker is well within his jurisdiction to hold discussion on this,” Congress spokesman Abhishek Singhvi said.

BJP Seeks Probe

Meanwhile, the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) has demanded a parliamentary committee investigation against former Jharkhand Chief Minister Shibu Soren. The party claims that the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha chief allotted 2 million tons of coal to non-core consumers at lower rates in January, during his tenure as federal minister.

In a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, BJP state secretary Prem Kataruka said that as minister for coal and mines, Soren had allotted coal to the National Coal Consumers’ Federation of Kanpur at “linkage rates”, which is the rate at which coal is sold to the core sectors.

“Even as the Jharkhand government had been persistently demanding allotment of coal for the core sectors in the state, the request had been denied by the Coal Ministry,” Kataruka alleged. Pointing out that linkage rates were lower than market rates, Kataruka said it was strange that such a huge amount of coal had been sold to a non-core consumer denying the legitimate claims of the core sector.

“This smacks of a scandal. We suspect that crores (tens of millions) of rupees have changed hands in the deal just before the elections,” Kataruka said. Jharkhand went to the polls in February.