NEW DELHI, 27 April 2007 — Both houses of Parliament, resuming the budget session after the recess yesterday, witnessed uproarious scenes with members raising issues such as a human trafficking racket allegedly involving some MPs and the arrest of three police officers for killing an innocent as terrorist in Gujarat.
The Congress party and its United Progressive Alliance (UPA) allies vociferously raised the issue of the human trafficking racket allegedly involving Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Babubhai Katara in both houses even as Lok Sabha (lower house) Speaker Somnath Chatterjee condemned it and asked the member not to attend the house till he was cleared of the charge.
Expressing concern over Katara’s arrest last week, Somnath said he would call a meeting of all party leaders to decide how such a matter may be dealt with in future “so that the prestige of the great institution is upheld.”
Katara, who represents Dahod of Gujarat, was arrested on April 18 at the Indira Gandhi International Airport here while trying to smuggle out a woman and a boy on the diplomatic passports of his wife and son. One of Katara’s accomplices, arrested later, has named for more MPs as involved in the scam.
The BJP government of Gujarat also came under attack with UPA MPs demanding a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe into the alleged staged shooting in November 2005 of a Muslim man in a fake encounter and the arrest of three senior police officers in the case on Tuesday.
“The incident is the most sordid affair. We are sure there won’t be an impartial inquiry into the fake shootouts in the state,” said Congress chief whip Madhusudan Mistry, who is from Gujarat.
He was strongly supported by several MPs from the ruling alliance and the Left parties leading to noisy scenes that forced the speaker to adjourn the house 15 minutes before lunch. “There have been around 150 such incidents in Gujarat since 2002,” Mistry said amid shouts of “shame” from the treasury benches.
Mistry and his colleagues asked Home Minister Shivraj Patil to make a statement on the matter.
He raised the issue immediately after the BJP-led opposition walked out protesting the government’s inability to make a statement on Hurriyat Conference leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani’s rally in Srinagar on Sunday where separatist supporters raised pro-Pakistan slogans. “The encounters engineered by the Narendra Modi government in Gujarat were just to harass the minorities,” Mistry alleged.
Despite the speaker’s attempts to calm them down, the agitated members remained on their legs forcing him to adjourn the house.
Acting on a Supreme Court directive, the Gujarat police Tuesday arrested two police officers from the state and one from Rajasthan for killing Sohrabuddin Sheikh in an engineered shooting in Ahmedabad in November 2005 after claiming that he was a terrorist with the Lashkar-e-Taiba links and planned to kill Modi.
In the Rajya Sabha (upper house), slogan-shouting BJP members, after stalling question hour, stormed the well of the house demanding Geelani’s arrest for the anti-India slogans raised at his rally in Srinagar.
Buoyed by the vociferous BJP members, Arvind Trivedi of the Trinamool Congress raised the issue of Nandigram in West Bengal where he said several peasants opposing land acquisition for an industrial project had been killed in police firing last month.
