 "Parliament disrupted over Karti Chidambaram")
Members of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) disrupted proceedings in both Houses to demand action against Congress leader Karti Chidambaram, son of party senior P Chidambaram, for his alleged involvement in the Aircel-Maxis issue. Later in the day, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad held a press conference saying how the then home minister, P Chidambaram, made the United Progressive Alliance-II government change its affidavit in the Ishrat Jahan encounter case.
On Tuesday, the two Houses were slated to discuss the motion of thanks on the President's Address. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi are likely to speak on the motion on Wednesday.
The Rajya Sabha was also scheduled to take up a calling attention motion on an inflammatory speech allegedly by junior human resource development (HRD) minister Ram Shankar Katheria last week in Agra. Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad said the AIADMK protest was "being organised by the ruling party" so the House would be unable to discuss Katheria's 'inflammatory speech' allegedly against a minority community. A minister later said the entire world knows the Congress and the AIADMK were together in their opposition to the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Constitution amendment Bill. In the morning, Katheria told reporters that he didn't make the comments attributed to him in some media reports.
AIADMK members in both Houses waved copies of a newspaper that had on Tuesday published a report on the alleged involvement of Karti in the Aircel-Maxis issue. In the Lok Sabha, junior parliamentary affairs minister Rajiv Pratap Rudy said the matter was already being investigated by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and it was incorrect for the AIADMK members to accuse the government of not having taken any action. Some weeks ago, ED teams had carried out raids at offices of those associated with Karti. Meanwhile, the Opposition and ruling-alliance members moved privilege motions accusing each other of misleading Parliament. Opposition filed a privilege motion against HRD minister Smriti Irani for 'misleading' Parliament on some of the facts on the suicide of Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula. Bharatiya Janata Party members filed a privilege motion against Janata Dal (United) Rajya Sabha member K C Tyagi for his claim that never before had police entered the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus.
The BJP pointed out that Delhi Police had entered the campus in 1983, 1999 and 2009 and during the Emergency.
Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya had also moved a privilege motion against Congress MP Jyotiraditya Scindia. The Congress MP from Guna had alleged during his speech in the Lok Sabha last week that Dattatreya in his letter to HRD Minister had called Vemula "casteist, extremist and anti-national". Dattatreya has said Scindia misled the House as the letter had no specific mention of Vemula, but complained of "casteist, extremist and anti-national" politics in the Hyderabad Central University campus.
While senior BJP leaders now agree that Irani shouldn't have made public letters from Opposition MPs requesting admission to central government run schools for children of their constituents or even the comments posted on social networking sites on Goddess Durga and Mahisasura, the party plans to defend the minister in Parliament. The BJP will maintain that all documents that Irani read out from were duly authenticated.