AAP has not sought Lamba’s resignation: Sisodia

Team Udayavani, Dec 23, 2018, 8:50 AM IST

New Delhi: Senior AAP leader Manish Sisodia Saturday rejected party MLA Alka Lamba’s claim that Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had “demanded” her resignation for not supporting a resolution in the assembly on revoking late PM Rajiv Gandhi’s Bharat Ratna.

“Neither any resignation has been sought (from Lamba) nor is anyone resigning,” Sisodia, the deputy chief minister of Delhi, told reporters at a press conference here.

Separately, Lamba told PTI, “I am not resigning.” 

The Delhi Assembly on Friday adopted a resolution on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in which it was demanded that the Bharat Ratna awarded to Gandhi be withdrawn, but the AAP swiftly distanced itself from the reference to the Congress leader.

The matter became a major crisis within the AAP with Lamba alleging on Friday that she was “put under pressure” to support the resolution, which she resisted and boycotted.

She claimed she spoke to Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) supremo Kejriwal who, she said, asked her to resign as MLA. “I am ready to do so,” she had said.

Sisodia clarified that the lines about Gandhi were not part of the original resolution placed before the House. 

It was a handwritten amendment proposed by a member and it cannot be passed in such a manner, he added.

“The aim of the original resolution, moved by MLA Jarnail Singh, was only to help the victims of 1984 riots get justice. No resolution mentioning late PM Rajiv Gandhi was passed in the assembly as being reported in the media,” Sisodia said.

AAP spokesperson Saurabh Bharadwaj, who narrated the entire sequence of events in the assembly, clarified that any amendment to a resolution can become a part of the original only after it has been separately voted on by the House, which did not happen in this case.

“There was no mention of Rajiv Gandhi in the original resolution. It was an individual handwritten proposal by MLA Somnath Bharti,” he said.

Asked if the party will take any action against Bharti, Sisodia said it will talk to him on the matter.

Jarnail Singh, while moving the resolution in the assembly, had mentioned Gandhi’s name while reading the text and demanded that the Congress leader’s Bharat Ratna be withdrawn for “justifying the anti-Sikh riots”.

Later, he had said though the reference to Gandhi in the resolution was not there in the written copies, it was made orally and passed by the House by voice vote.

The resolution called for speedy trial of cases and termed anti-Sikh riots as genocide.