Councillor Prince raises multiple issues

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, March 20

Having taken on two former BJP mayors vociferously as the Leader of Opposition for 10 years, it remained a tough ride for Jagdish Raja to defend himself and his government as he chaired his first budget session as the Mayor of the Congress House.

Even as the new Leader of Opposition Manjinder Chatha chose to remain mum owing to ill health, his role was rather played by perhaps the youngest BJP councillor Baljit Prince, who kept the ruling party councillors engaged with strong arguments and counter-arguments.

Unlike most other 60-odd middle-aged first timers who chose to speak on very ward-specific issues, Prince took the maximum footage by making the ruling party councillors answerable to the state-level issues and promises that they had made in the previous term.

Almost all senior Congress councilors, including Jalandhar MLA’s wife Uma Beri, Aruna Arora, Banti Neelkanth, Mandeep Jassal and Sherry Chadha, had to come together in front of him to respond to his queries which he almost single-handedly handled.

The most prominent issue taken up by him was of property tax imposition over which the Congress councillors, then as Opposition in the House, had raised. Flashing multiple colour prints of news reports with their pictures of protest and holding the mike close to him, he asked the Mayor, “You along with other councillors sitting here had protested when the property tax was imposed. You came to power on the promise that you will get it abolished. Now please share your plan.”

The Congress councillors had no reply initially for 10 minutes and he kept going louder and raising slogans. It was finally Uma Beri who stood up from her seat and came to him, holding her mike. “How can you blame us for its implementation? It was your government which did it. Are you not in support of your own government’s decision?”

But the tall youth, who is the son of ex-councillor Arjun Pappi, kept countering the ruling members, asking, “What about your promise? We did not promise but you did. Check out your picture and statement here in this report? Are you dithering from it now? What answer will you give back to the residents who voted for you taking into account this issue too?”

After almost half an hour of utter turmoil and effort, the Mayor silenced him by repeatedly asking him to sit and listen to his reply, “We cannot get the Centre schemes till the time we implement property tax. Do you know how much crisis we are in after the term of the previous BJP House ended? We need development and funds for that. As and when we will be comfortable, we will consider its abolition in consideration with you.”

Fact file

• Mayor Jagdish Raja was repeatedly addressed by members of his House as ‘Bauji’, a sobriquet locally used for him.

• Perhaps the only person who did not stand up and speak was his wife and former Senior Deputy Mayor Anita Raja.

• Raja allowed almost all councillors who stood up to raise their questions, adopting former Mayor Rakesh Rathour’s strategy. The zero hour stretched to nearly two hours.

• Raja announced that there could be another House meeting before the end of this month, which will be the third in March.

LED light project

Among Congress councillors, another youth leader Rohan Sehgal remained the most articulate in the lot. His main proposal was that the LED light project should be started in a phase-wise manner in each ward so as to rule out any allegations of partiality. 

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