BANGALORE, January 22: Former Karnataka chief minister Ramakrishna Hegde's outfit, Lok Shakti, today urged the Governor to intervene in the summoning of the January 27 one-day Assembly session called to enable the J H Patel ministry to demonstrate its strength.A Lok Shakti delegation told Governor Khursheed Alam Khan that the state government's effort to prove a majority when it already enjoyed one was ``superfluous and ridiculous''.
The session, which would cost the state exchequer a ``tidy sum of money'', was an avoidable and wasteful expenditure, and called for intervention by the Governor and the Election Commission, the delegation said in a memorandum.
Briefing reporters, party secretary B R Patil, who led the delegation, said it amounted to an unconstitutional exercise of political power to influence the voters when the process for the Lok Sabha polls had been initiated.
The memorandum said that since the poll process had begun and the election code had come into being, the Chief Minister's
action seeking the convening of the session raised some basic issues of Constitutional propriety and democratic conventions.
The delegation said the common practice was to summon the Assembly to test the majority of a government when it was called into question, adding no such situation had arisen.
The ruling Janata Dal, it said, had reduced itself to a ``sub-regional party'' but even the association of three ministers, who resigned on Tuesday, with Ramakrishna Hegde's non-political Rashtreeya Nava Nirmana Vedike in no way amounted to floor crossing.
Meanwhile, today two members of the Karnataka Legislative Council and some of the members of Lok Shakti has alleged that the Chief Minister's announcement seeking vote of confidence to prove the majority of his Government on Jan 27 was an act in violation of Election Code of Conduct.
The two MLCs, B R Pattil and Mahadev Banakar, and others, who met the Governor on Thursday morning and submitted a memorandum stated that the act of calling a emergency
session of the State Assembly was against the ``set norms of the business of state legislature.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
