The Rajya Sabha witnessed a sharp exchange between Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and BJP’s JP Nadda on Wednesday over police action against student protesters.
Kharge raised the issue of an attempt by a Delhi Police team to detain SFI leader Aishe Ghosh from the CPM’s AKG Bhavan office on Tuesday, describing it as “very shameful” that police would “barge into a national party office and try to arrest.”
“I request you, people who have gone there unauthorised, they should be punished,” Kharge said, adding that “democracy is not safe, people are not safe.”
JP Nadda, Leader of the House in the Rajya Sabha, defended the police action in response, calling it “a very normal law and order situation that we have to understand,” and saying police had “acted according to the law and order situation.”
Nadda further said “any student who is into activism will have to face such a situation,” recalling that he himself had been arrested during student activism in the Emergency era.
The clash follows the July 20 ‘Sansad Chalo’ march, when protesters linked to the Cockroach Janta Party marched from Jantar Mantar towards Parliament over demands tied to alleged exam paper leaks.
The march turned confrontational when security personnel attempted to stop it, with reports of lathi-charge and tear gas use during the clashes.
The protests ultimately led to the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on July 25, after weeks of demonstrations over exam-related concerns.
The exchange took place as the Lok Sabha continued debating the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Amendment Bill, intended to strengthen action against paper leak rackets.
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor separately said during the bill debate that the legislation “only talks about punishment and fast-track courts,” and argued that provisions to prevent paper leaks in the first place were also needed alongside punitive measures.
(Image: Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs, Government of India (GODL-India), via Press Information Bureau)
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