NEW DELHI, 10 June 2004 — India’s Hindu nationalist opposition paralyzed Parliament for a second day yesterday to pressure the new coalition government to drop Cabinet ministers charged with anything from corruption to attempted murder.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has been sniping at the new coalition since losing power in an election upset last month, said the appointment of “tainted” ministers had undermined Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s clean image.
“Manmohan Singh is an honorable man. The country expects him to assert himself in order to uphold the principles of probity in public life,” said BJP spokesman Arun Jaitley.
The soft-spoken Singh was named leader of the coalition government after Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, targeted for her Italian birth, turned down the job.
Indian law does not bar anyone from holding public office until proved guilty in a court of law. Singh named several leaders from regional ally Rashtriya Janata Dal, who are facing charges in court, to his 67-member council of ministers.
The most high-profile is Railways Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav, who faces several charges of corruption in government procurement when he was chief minister of the impoverished eastern state of Bihar.
“There is only one issue, the tainted ministers must go,” BJP member Vijay Kumar Malhotra shouted in the lower house of Parliament, triggering noisy protests from Congress and the RJD. Both houses of Parliament were adjourned without conducting any business.
Another RJD leader, Taslimuddin and who is a junior minister in the department of agriculture, has been charged with several offenses including an attempt to murder a rival, looting of arms from a police station and intimidation.
Two other ministerial colleagues from Laloo’s party also face graft charges.
The Congress and its allies say the ministers are innocent and instead accuse the BJP of double-standards on public probity when it was in power.
17 Injured in Blast
Seventeen people were injured yesterday in a blast set off by suspected ethnic rebels at a cinema in northeast India that defied a separatist ban on Hindi-language films, police said.
Rebels hurled a grenade from the top of the stairs at the cinema in Tinsukia in the state of Assam, sparking chaos in the audience and injuring 17 people, some seriously, a police official said by telephone.
“The cinema was screening a Hindi film and we suspect the attack was an attempt at enforcing the ban by militants,” said the official in Tinsukia, 550 km east of Assam’s capital Guwahati.
The official suspected the attack was carried out by the United Liberation Front of Asom, one of 11 separatist groups in northeastern India who issued a joint statement in November demanding a ban on Hindi films.
