LS Speaker refers Bidhuri-Ali case to Privileges Committee

A week after Muslim MP Danish Ali received racial epithets from BJP MP Ramesh Bidhuri in the Lok Sabha, Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla has referred the matter to the Privileges Committee. The panel will also look at some of the complaints against Ali.
Some BJP lawmakers had accused the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) lawmaker of using derogatory language toward Prime Minister Narendra Modi and “provoking” Bidhuri to make the comments.
On 21 September, when speaking in the Lok Sabha in the new Parliament building, Bidhuri used a number of offensive and divisive comments against Ali. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh apologised in Parliament on behalf of his party’s MP after the remarks provoked considerable censure and indignation from the Opposition and on social media. In a letter to Speaker Om Birla, the BSP MP and representatives from four opposition parties—the Congress, DMK, Trinamool Congress, and NCP—demanded urgent sanctions against Bidhuri.BJP MPs Nishikant Dubey and Ravi Kishan had also written to the Speaker later, and alleged that Bidhuri had made objectionable remarks against PM Modi.
All of these complaints have now been referred to the Privileges Committee. In his letter to the Speaker, Nishikant Dubey had condemned the language used by Bidhuri, but demanded that the “unsavoury” conduct of Ali be investigated as well.
Dubey alleged that when Bidhuri was speaking, the BSP MP was “busy instigating” him and also—at the top of his voice—made a “highly objectionable and blasphemous remark” against PM Modi.
“This statement made by Danish Ali, I think, was more than enough for any patriotic public representative to ‘lose his calm’ and fall into his trap by uttering unsavoury words,” Dubey said.
Ali had accused the BJP of trying to frame a false narrative and claimed he had said or done no such thing. “Today, some BJP leaders are trying to frame a narrative that I provoked Shri Ramesh Bidhuri in the Parliament, whereas the truth is that I worked to save the dignity of the post of Prime Minister. I demanded that the Chairman expunge the highly objectionable words used against Modiji from the record,” he had said. The BSP MP had also shared a video of what happened after Bidhuri’s outburst. In the video, a shaken Ali can be heard saying, “Sir, sir… honourable member is saying ‘terrorist’! To whom is he saying ‘terrorist’? Are there terrorists in this House?”
The fact that the matter has been referred to the Privileges Committee was announced on Thursday by Dubey, who thanked the Speaker for doing so.
In the same breath, he also took a swipe at the opposition and said that earlier governments had failed to take action against errant MPs, including former Congress chief Sonia Gandhi.
“Grateful to the Speaker of the Lok Sabha @ombirlakota, he entrusted the responsibility of investigation in the Danish Ali case to the committee of @LokSabhaSectt.
This was possible because BJP has a majority in the Lok Sabha, otherwise no committee was formed or action taken when, in the Lok Sabha, there was an RJD-JDU- Congress’ shoe and mic fight in 2016, an assault by Sonia Gandhi in 2012 and a fistfight at time of the formation of Telangana in 2014, when MPs were injured,” Dubey posted on X, formerly Twitter.