Breach of privilege motion moved against minister

NEW DELHI:  The Congress on Thursday moved a breach of privilege motion against the Minister of State for Health Bharati Pravin Pawar, for allegedly misleading the Parliament over deaths caused by shortage of oxygen during the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Congress MP KC Venugopal moved the notice in response to reply to his question in the upper House, where Pawar on Tuesday said that no state reported such fatalities.

Venugopal in his notice said that the response of the minister is not only wrong but was made deliberately to mislead the House and distort the facts related to deaths due to the lack of the life-saving gas during the second wave. “This amounts to a breach of privilege and contempt of the House and the minister is guilty of contempt,” he said.

Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya, during a discussion on Covid-19 in the House, has said that the Centre did not ask the states to suppress fatalities and it only uploaded the data that was provided by the governments of the respective states and Union Territories..

Venugopal said that everyone saw how a huge number of people suffered and died due to an acute shortage of medical oxygen in many parts of the country, including the national capital, and cited what he claimed were examples of deaths caused by a shortage of oxygen.

Referring to a newspaper report, the Congress Rajya Sabha MP said between May 11 and 15, 83 deaths due to acute oxygen shortage were reported at the Goa Medical College. Similar instances were cited by him which reportedly took place in Karnataka and Haryana, where the government ordered investigations into at least 19 deaths due to oxygen shortage between April 5 and May 1. There were similar reports from other parts of the country as well.

Motion against delhi police, too
New Delhi: Congress MPs Partap Singh Bajwa and Deepnder Singh Hooda have moved a breach of privilege motion against Delhi Police for stopping them to brief the media at Vijay Chowk. “We are consistently denied the right to speak about the farmers’ protest in the Parliament and now have been stopped while briefing the press. This is shocking,” said Bajwa. He said that the police told them to seek permission from higher authorities.