Comment about Rahul Gandhi triggers uproar in Rajya Sabha

 A comment by a Minister about Rahul Gandhi in Rajya Sabha on Friday triggered uproar briefly with Congress members objecting to mentioning his name as he is not a member of the upper House.

Congress members protested when Chemicals and Fertilisers Minister Anant Kumar said Rahul Gandhi had engaged in "false propaganda" during a rally in Haryana in run up to recent assembly elections that NDA government had increased prices of essential drugs. Kumar asserted that there had been no increase in the prices of essential drugs in the last six months and rather the costs have come down.

Protesting this, Congress members, including Kumari Selja and Rapolu Ananda Bhaskar, were on their feet saying it was "unparliamentary" to name a person who is not a member of the House. The Congress Vice President is a member of Lok Sabha. While Chairman Hamid Ansari pacified the members by saying that he would go through the proceedings to see if any unparliamentary mention had been made, Kumar quipped that he does not think "Rahul Gandhi's name is unparliamentary".

The Minister was referring to Gandhi's rally in Firozpur Jhirka in Haryana in October where he had said that the Narendra Modi government had lifted control on drug prices at the behest of some US companies which has led to increase in prices of cancer medicines to over Rs one lakh from Rs 8,000 earlier.