Chennai: The Tamil Nadu Assembly witnessed ugly scenes on Saturday during Chief Minister Edappadi Palaniswami's trust vote with Opposition DMK MLAs caught on camera pushing the Speaker around and their leader MK Stalin claiming his shirt was torn by House marshals.
The ruckus broke out after the Speaker rejected the demand for a secret ballot raised by the DMK and the rival AIADMK faction led by O Panneerselvam.
“I have to decide how the voting method should be. Nobody can interfere in my decision on how to vote," the Speaker shouted over the ruckus.
That set off a new set of events with DMK MLAs rushing into the well of the House shouting slogans and a few of them tried to climb on to the Speaker’s dais. Amid the ruckus, members broke chairs, tore off microphones, and TV pictures showed one of the MLAs grabbing the Speaker’s chair damaging it.
The House was adjourned, and after it reconvened at 1 PM the Speaker evicted all the 88 DMK MLAs. But they refused to move out, forcing another adjournment.
While she was presenting her trust motion, five Congress MLAs rebelled against their party line when they learnt that Rajiv Gandhi had asked them to oppose the motion.
Violence erupted inside the Assembly, which went on for an hour till the police was called in to lathicharge the MLAs. Over a 100 microphones were broken and 20 legislators were injured.
A year later, violence returned to the Assembly when the DMK was in power. During Karunanidhi’s budget speech, a Congress MLA got up to claim that Jayalalithaa was being harassed by the police.
Jayalalithaa, the leader of Opposition at this point, substantiated the MLAs claims and violence began even before Karunanidhi could respond. The situation soon worsened as Karunanidhi’s sunglasses were broken in the chaos and an MLA even tried to disrobe Jayalalitha.
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