Moitra accuses Ethics Committee chairman of 'proverbial vastraharan'; shoots letter to Om Birla

Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra on Thursday shot off a letter to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, accusing the Ethics Committee chairman of “proverbial ‘vastraharan’ (disrobing)” by pursuing “filthy line” of questioning her in the cash for query allegations against her.

In her three-page letter to Birla that was posted on ‘X’, she also objected to Ethics Committee chairman Vinod Sonkar’s remarks to the media about the Trinamool MP “dodging questions” and said she was willing to put her statement on affidavit to the Speaker.

“Humiliating a female MP by asking irrelevant questions – one of these was for example on who I speak to at night, how many times and asking for those call details – is a breach of my fundamental right to privacy, apart from being in extremely poor taste,” she said.

She said Birla should go through the verbatim proceedings of the committee and recognise the fact that “nothing could have been more unethical or unfair than what transpired today” while urging him to give protection to her from being subjected to “personal humiliation and malicious conduct”.

Mahua and five Opposition MPs in the Ethics Committee “walked out and boycotted” the meeting after two hours of proceedings, claiming that they objected to Sonkar seeking response to personal questions like her travel details, phone records and friends.

She said she was writing in “great anguish” to update the Speaker on the “unethical, sordid and prejudiced behaviour” meted out to her at Thursday’s hearing by the chairperson. “I have been subjected to the proverbial ‘vastraharan’ by him” in the presence of other MPs, she said.

Demanding that the Ethics Committee should be renamed as it has “no ethics or morality left”, Mahual alleged that Sonkar “exhibited a preconceived bias by maliciously and clearly in a defamatory way” questioned her, prompting five out of 11 MPs to walk out of the meeting.

“The Chairman today insisted on following the most sordid line of questioning while reading from a script (no doubt prepared by some interested parties) in which he asked me detailed and extremely personal questions about my private life. He continued even after being warned multiple times by other members of the committee to refrain from this filthy line of questioning,” she claimed.

She said she repeatedly protested on record while insisting that the Chairman was welcome to ask her any question relevant to enquiry, including about the login and the allegations of her receiving gifts for which “evidence, or rather lack of it, existed. He cannot ask me detailed personal questions making insinuations about my dignity as a woman,” she said.

In her letter, she said she told the committee that she respected the proceedings of the panel but it was against her personal dignity and rights to be subjected to this line of questioning by the chairperson, who “seemed to get vicarious enjoyment from his words”.