There was a major security breach during Zero Hour in Parliament on Wednesday afternoon after two men, both carrying canisters emitting an as yet unidentified yellow smoke, jumped from the visitors’ gallery and ran into the Lok Sabha chamber. Incredible footage from the House’s CCTV system showed one man, wearing a dark blue shirt, leaping across desks to evade capture, while the second was in the visitors’ gallery spraying smoke. Both men were overpowered by MPs and security staff.
Lok Sabha resumed at 2 pm, with Speaker Om Birla making a brief statement. “We are investigating the matter and have asked Delhi Police to join the inquiry,” he told understandably agitated MPs.
“Both have been caught and the materials with them have also been seized. The two people (they have been identified as Sagar Sharma and D Manoranjan) outside Parliament have also been arrested.”
The Lower House was later adjourned till 11 am Thursday.
Earlier, shocking visuals shared by news agency ANI showed a Lok Sabha official reading to the House seconds before the chaos. Suddenly, shouts of “catch him, catch him” could be heard as one of the intruders, Sagar Sharma, was shown trying to reach the Speaker’s Chair. Congress MP Rahul Gandhi and union ministers Hardeep Singh Puri and Anupriya Patel were present at the time.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi was not in Parliament; he was in Chhattisgarh’s Raipur about to preside over the swearing-in ceremony of the BJP’s new Chief Minister, Vishnu Deo Sai.
A visitor’s pass was recovered after the two Lok Sabha intruders were caught; photographs of the pass indicate they were issued by the office of Pratap Simha, the BJP MP from Mysuru, claimed NDTV. Any visitor must clear multiple levels of security before being allowed inside Parliament.
Congress MP Karti Chidambaram told NDTV he initially thought somebody had fallen down from the visitors’ gallery. “It was only after the second person jumped that I realized it was a security breach… the gas could have been poisonous. One of the men was running to the Speaker’s Chair. This is a serious breach of security especially on December 13, the day when Parliament was attacked in 2001.”
Trinamool Congress MP Sudip Bandyopadhyay called it a “terrible experience”. “Nobody could guess their target… why were they doing this? We left immediately but it was a security lapse!” he said.
Meanwhile, two other individuals – a man and a woman – were detained outside Parliament, also with coloured pressurised canisters that exploded and spewed red and yellow smoke..
Delhi Police sources have told NDTV the two incidents are likely related. According to news agency PTI, the man and woman have been identified as Amol Shinde, 25, and Neelam, 42.
Visuals of this incident showed the two shouting “dictatorship will not be tolerated”.
Delhi Police’s anti-terror unit has taken over the investigation into both incidents.
Serious questions are already being questioned about the security breach which comes on the 22nd anniversary of the terror attack on the old Parliament building. In fact, hours earlier, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Droupadi Murmu led a tribute to the nine people who were killed.
