Aam Aadmi Party Rajya Sabha member Raghav Chadha on Friday posted a video on X, saying he had only been stifled and not defeated, a day after he was removed as the deputy leader of the party in the Upper House of Parliament.
“I am asking this today because the AAP has written to the Rajya Sabha secretariat requesting that I be stopped from speaking in Parliament. Yes, the AAP has informed Parliament that I should not be given an opportunity to speak. But why would anyone want to silence me?” Chadha asked in the video.
“To those who have taken away my right to speak in Parliament and tried to silence me, I want to say this: do not mistake my silence for defeat. I am a river that turns into a flood when the time comes.”
Chadha claimed he raised issues in Parliament which affected the lives of the common people.
“Whenever I got the opportunity to speak in Parliament, I always raised issues of public interest. I raised issues that are important to the well-being of the aam aadmi (the common man). Is that a crime,” Chadha asked in the video shared on his X (formerly known as Twitter) handle. “Did I make a mistake? Did I do something wrong? Be it about toll plaza loot, food adulteration cases, fighting for the rights of gig workers, I have always talked about the “aam aadmi”. Why would that be a threat to the Aam Aadmi Party?”
On Thursday AAP wrote to the Rajya Sabha secretariat about Chadha, an MP from Punjab, being replaced by another Punjab Upper House MP Ashok Mittal as the deputy leader. The party also requested that Chadha be excluded from the list of speakers in Parliament.
Though the party has not clarified why it decided to drop Chadha, sources said the AAP leaders were unhappy with the young MP for some time.
In the crucial impeachment motion against the chief election commissioner Chadha was a notable Opposition MP who did not sign the document.
Delhi Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) President Saurabh Bharadwaj alleged that Chadha failed to toe the party's line on several matters in Parliament and did not join opposition walkouts on key issues.
"We all are soldiers of Arvind Kejriwal, the Centre doesn't care about soft PR or talking about samosas at airport canteens when bigger issues are at stake," Bharadwaj said in a video posted on X.
"Whenever the Opposition staged a walkout in Parliament, you (Chadha) did not participate. You did not raise issues concerning Punjab, from where you are elected, and you hid in a foreign country when former Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal was arrested," he added.
AAP’s official spokesperson, Anurag Danda, questioned Chadha’s silence on the arrest of AAP workers in Narendra Modi’s home state Gujarat.
“In Parliament, the party gets just a little time to speak - in that, we can either struggle to save the nation or push to make samosas cheaper in airport canteens. In Gujarat,hundreds of our workers have been arrested by the BJP’s police - did the MP say a word in the House,” asked Dhanda. “We are Kejriwal’s soldiers. Fearlessness is our identity. If someone fears Modi, will they fight for the country?”
