New Delhi: Aam Aadmi Party’s Saurabh Bharadwaj on Friday launched an all-out attack on his party colleague, Raghav Chadha. He questioned the Rajya Sabha MP’s silence on key issues in Parliament, and advised him to raise ‘real’ matters in the limited speaking time allotted to leaders of smaller parties.
AAP has written to the Rajya Sabha Secretariat to remove Chadha from the position of Deputy Leader of the party in the Rajya Sabha. They appointed MP Ashok Mittal in his place.
‘We need to question government fearlessly: AAP
AAP leader Saurabh Bharadwaj released a video questioning Chadha’s silence on issues from Punjab, which he represents in Parliament. He asked why was he talking about “samosas” in Parliament.
Bharadwaj directly addressed Chadha in the video. He said, “Raghav bhai, I just watched your video. We are all soldiers of Arvind Kejriwal ji. We learned only one thing — the one who gets scared is as good as dead. Our job was to raise people’s issues and look the government in the eye while questioning it.”
He further said that in the last few years we have seen that whoever questions the government and raises the issues of the people, is silenced by the government. He reminded Chadha that such people are often silenced through false court cases. He said that the government does not care if someone is doing soft PR in Parliament. He said that there was need to raise the national issues, instead of talking about the trivial issues in the House.
He reminded Chadha about the party’s slogan, “Jo dar gaya, samjho mar gaya.”
He also accused Chadha of not joining the Opposition bloc on important issues, like the issues of ‘vote chori’ in West Bengal. He also said that Chadha did not sign the motion brought in by the Opposition to impeach the Chief Election Commissioner and does not join walkouts by the opposition in Parliament.
He asked, “You represent Punjab and you must raise issues of Punjab. Why are you afraid to raise them?”
Joining Bharadwaj in criticising Chadha was National Media In-charge, Anurag Dhanda. In a post on ‘X’, he said, “We are the soldiers of Kejriwal. Our identity is fearlessness. If somebody is afraid of Modi, can he fight for the country?”
He further said that smaller parties get very less time to speak in Parliament. In this little time, either the representatives of the party can talk about how to save the country, or just raise issues regarding the cost of samosas in airport canteens. He then went on to question Chadha’s silence on numerous issues like arrest of AAP workers in Gujarat, not signing the Opposition’s proposal to impeach the CEC and not staging walkouts along with the Opposition.
He said that it seems that in the last few years, Chadha was scared to raise his voice against the Modi government. He also reminded him about the party’s slogan, like Bharadwaj.
AAP’s Ashok Mittal who will replace Chadha as the new Deputy leader of the party in the Rajya Sabha, chose to take a more toned down stand on the matter. He was quoted by news agencies as saying, “AAP is a party that functions democratically. Our party always tries to give different responsibilities to different people so that they can learn from it and also amplify the voice of the people. Before Raghav ji, ND Gupta ji served as the Deputy Leader. Now, I have been appointed to this post, and tomorrow someone else will come. Such changes are a normal process in our party.”