"People's Justice...": TMC Mahua Moitra takes oath at the 18th Lok Sabha

Trinamool Congress Member of Parliament Mahua Moitra took oath for the 18th Lok Sabha on Tuesday as opposition leaders called her ‘comeback’ as “people’s justice”. The two-time Krishnanagar MP was expelled from the 17th Lok Sabha in December 2023 on the recommendations of the Ethics Committee that found her “guilty” in an alleged cash-for-query case. Moitra had all along denounced the allegations as baseless and called them vindictive after she had questioned the “Adani-Modi” association.

“This is the beginning of your [Narendra Modi-led government’s] end. We will come back and see the end of you”, Mahua Moitra had said on December 8, last year, the day she was expelled, with opposition leaders including Congress leader Sonia Gandhi standing by her side in a show of solidarity. Known for her fiery speeches, Moitra, on Tuesday while taking the oath, kept calm and to the script, merely ended her oath in Bengali with “Jai Hind, Jai Sambhidan (constitution), Jai Bangla”. Later on, taking on ‘X’, the re-elected MP thanked people and wrote “The mills of God grind slowly but they grind exceedingly fine. Thank you, everyone, for the love and support”.

Trinamool Congress members raised slogans supporting her after she took her oath as the MP. “Ethics Committee has lost today and Mahua has won”, shouted her colleague and TMC MP Kalyan Banerjee as the treasury bench stayed quiet.

“For the past 10 years the kind of emergency the country was put into by PM Narendra Modi and the BJP government where the voices of dissent, people’s voice, and the constitution were suppressed; where the judiciary was suppressed, it was nothing short of undeclared emergency. But now what is happening, is an emergency for PM Modi. The 56-inch-chested Modi was shown the constitution reminding him that he isn’t God. He has been brought back to the ground. If he forgets the constitution hereafter then he won’t get the 240 he got this time”, said Mahua Moitra before walking into the parliament for her oath-taking ceremony, as a counter to PM Modi’s remark reminding people how Tuesday also marked the 50th year of the “emergency period”.