At 101 pages, the address wouldn’t have been completed even sans uproar

Even if the opposition had not caused an uproar in the Vidhan Sabha Hall, governor Ram Naik probably would not have been able to read out his address in full before a joint sitting of two houses of the state legislature here on Monday as it was quite long.

The Yogi Adityanath government gave him 101 pages to read at the joint sitting. The governor’s address was scheduled from 11am to 12.30pm on the state assembly’s agenda. He would have had to complete his address in 90 minutes.

The governor read out only excerpts from select pages in nearly 35-minutes. At a breakneck speed too, he would have been able to read out only half the address. The address given to him by the Yogi Adityanath government was only eight pages shorter than 109 pages that the Akhilesh Yadav government gave him to read out in the Vidhan Sabha Hall on January 28, 2016.

As the governor wanted to read out his complete address, he had asked chief minister Yogi Adityanath to reduce the number of pages of his speech to a ‘readable’ length. The governor had made his wishes clear to the chief minister during a meeting with him at Raj Bhavan here on May 10. Naik’s keenness to readout his complete address became evident even on Monday. He tried to read out as many pages of his address as possible amid the ruckus that the opposition continued to create in house.

“I felt a positive atmosphere was created by the Vidhan Sabha’s decision to accord a new protocol and the discussions held at the two-day orientation programme organised for the new members. So, I thought the convention of causing disturbance during the governor’s address will end. I feel the members did not uphold the dignity of the House. I feel sad for the inconvenience caused to security staff of the Vidhan Sabha,” said the governor on the phone.