Kolkata, Dec 7 (IANS): BJP legislators in West Bengal on Thursday refused to accept the 'fruit gifts' given to all legislators in the state by the Assembly Speaker Biman Bandopadhyay.
The BJP legislators claimed that they refused the gift as a mark of protest against the suspension of Opposition leader Suvendu Adhikari for the entire Winter Session of the House as well as the action over an FIR against the party legislators in "false" cases of insult of the national anthem.
The Speaker, an elected legislator from the Baruipur-West assembly constituency in South 24 Parganas, is famous for it tasty and mouth-watering guavas, and every year the Speaker arranges for gifting baskets of those guavas to all the 294 members of the House.
On Friday, while the last day of the Winter Session of the Assembly was ongoing, the Speaker requested the legislators to collect the guava baskets.
However, confusion erupted within the House as the BJP legislators were staging a walkout.
Later, the Speaker called BJP's chief whip in the Assembly, Manoj Tigga, to his room and requested him to collect the guavas for all his party legislators.
Tigga, however, politely refused the offer and explained to the Speaker the reason for their refusal.
Earlier in October this year, the BJP's women legislators refused to accept the sarees brought as gifts for them by the Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee as a token of courteous ritual for the Durga Puja this year.
The BJP women legislators then refused to accept those gifts over the judgment given by a division bench of the Calcutta High Court recently rejecting the death penalty for three convicts in the 2013 rape and murder of a college girl at Kamduni in North 24 Parganas district, and acquitting one of them while sentencing the other two to life imprisonment.
The BJP legislators then argued that the verdict was a clear example of lackadaisical probe carried out by the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) officers and slapdash arguments by the public prosecutor at the Calcutta High Court in the case.