Modi, Shah Deign to Appear in Parliament For Four Minutes; In New Low, Bar Council Chair ‘Bans’ Law Grads For Their Dissent; Auto Giants Privately Fret Over E20 Contamination
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Snapshot of the day
August 13, 2026
Anirudh S.K.
In what may be yet another case of ‘70 saal mein pehli baar’, neither the prime minister nor the home minister was present in either House through an entire parliamentary session – barring a four-minute Vande Mataram appearance that seemed designed largely for the Godi media cameras. Today’s Lok Sabha session lasted about just as long because speaker Om Birla adjourned the proceedings right after. For all of the BJP's bluster on the national song, a number of its MPs – most prominently Narendra Modi – stood silently or seemingly silently while it was sung, producing the only mute-ny they or their forebears are likely to be involved in.
Amit Shah finally turned up to the House but the day's abrupt end meant no statement from him was possible on the police action against youth protesters on July 20, including the firing of pellet guns. With the government and the opposition in a deadlock over Shah's presence over the entire session, no discussion took place on examination irregularities or on the Ram Mandir embezzlement scandal either. The opposition continued to demonstrate till the very end – with the Congress's Pawan Khera and others holding up a toy monkey and chanting an adaptation of that trenchant slogan from the Jantar Mantar protests: “56 inch ka chhota bandar, jaldi aao sadan ke andar”.
The Rajya Sabha too was adjourned sine die after a recital of Vande Mataram but this House was able to pass the government's Mines and Minerals Amendment Bill before session-end. Leader of opposition Mallikarjun Kharge also deplored the fact that a group of Hindutvavadis “purified” with a havan a stage in Haldwani from which he delivered an address last week. “After my speech, you tried to insult me by doing a purification ritual, you made me feel the sting of untouchability,” Kharge, a Dalit, said in the House. One of the men involved in the havan had told the press that they conducted the ritual because the LoP ‘compared Hindu organisations to snakes’ and that some slogans raised during his address “sounded like Islamic slogans”. Going by this find by Alt News‘s Mohammed Zubair, that man’s ideological provenance explains a lot.
In the latest reprisal against dissenting youth, Bar Council of India chairperson and BJP MP Manan Mishra ‘directed’ NALSAR University to prepare a report within three days on students who organised a recent campaign calling on the law school to reconsider inviting Chief Justice of India Surya Kant to its convocation ceremony. In his missive Mishra did not satisfy himself with ‘directing’ that those students his obnoxious probe singles out be barred from enrolling as lawyers – he sought to put on hold the careers of all NALSAR students graduating this year until further orders.
Unsurprisingly Mishra’s move was met with opprobrium. Within hours he lifted the ‘moratorium’ on students joining the bar; the Council, he explained, has agreed that the “vast majority of the students … are innocent”. People who are on the other hand ‘guilty’ of objecting to Justice Kant’s presence at convocation “shall always be a liability on the profession”, Mishra had declared in his abortive letter (he finally backed off shortly after midnight, cancelling the probe as well). Given the momentous dent that the agitation spurred by Justice Kant’s own remarks have put in a certain 56-inch-wide thing Mishra is in awe of, should his stunt come as any surprise?
For a while there though, it seemed as if
