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Jaya Bachchan, (below) Pradeep Balmuchu |
March 20: Elders, please note: Jaya Bachchan won’t say cheese if you invade her privacy when she’s inside the House.
A fellow Rajya Sabha MP, Pradeep Balmuchu, learnt this the hard way this afternoon when the actress-politician told colleagues she had seen him taking her pictures on his cellphone.
The alleged incident occurred around 2pm when Renuka Chowdhury, who was in the chair, had adjourned the House for an hour after a ruckus on the Lanka issue.
Congress member Ambika Soni intervened and asked Balmuchu, who heads the Jharkhand Congress unit, to apologise, sources said.
Balmuchu went up to Jaya, one of the few celebrity members who takes her role as MP seriously and is a regular in the House, to say sorry.
But the Samajwady Party MP was not placated. “You will have to pay a price for this,” a source quoted her as saying. Jaya could not be contacted to confirm the version.
Till this evening, Jaya had not sent any official complaint against Balmuchu to the secretary-general’s office.
It is not clear if Balmuchu took the picture at all. Some sources claimed he deleted the pictures with the help of another member.
Contacted in the evening, Balmuchu denied he had taken any photographs. “I was reading an SMS on my BlackBerry. I even showed my phone to other MPs to prove that I wasn’t taking any pictures,” he said.
The incident came a day after the Lok Sabha passed the criminal amendment bill that makes ogling a woman a punishable offence.
Celebrities having cellphone cameras aimed at them in a public place is common. There is no clarity whether it is permissible for a member to click photographs inside the House. But from time to time, members are issued advisories asking them not to use their mobile phones inside Parliament.
“There have been a few instances in the 14th Lok Sabha when the Speaker was forced to confiscate members’ phones because they started ringing. But since then signal jammers have been installed and phones do not work inside both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha. But members are allowed to carry them inside,” a senior official said.
Last year all MPs were given iPads, which too have cameras, by the government and are routinely seen using these in the House.
On March 14, Trinamul Congress MP from Rajya Sabha Derek ’Brien uploaded a photograph of the ceiling of the Central Hall on Twitter. “Sharpening my photography skills while sitting in Central Hall,” he tweeted.
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