Congress MP Karti Chidambaram has written to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla regarding his questioning by the CBI in the Chinese visa scam case, saying "gross breach of Parliamentary Privilege by the central probe agency." Karti has alleged that during a raid CBI officers seized "highly confidential" personal notes and papers pertaining to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information and Technology of which he is a member, and sought redressal for what he said was a "breach of his parliamentary privilege".
“I've written to Lok Sabha Speaker that there has been a gross breach of Parliamentary Privilege by the CBI. My parliamentary committee papers that pertain to IT Committee have been taken during search and seizure. No one has the right to take these confidential papers,” Karti told a news agency.
"I am writing to you now because I have become the victim of a grossly illegal and patently unconstitutional action," Karti Chidambaram said in his letter to Birla.
"The Central Bureau of Investigation in the garb of conducting an investigation into an 11-year-old decision of the Government in which I have absolutely no involvement raided my residence in Delhi," he said. In the course of this so-called raid, certain officers of the CBI seized my "highly confidential and sensitive personal notes and papers" pertaining to the Parliamentary Standing Committee for Information and Technology, Karti Chidambaram alleged.
"Shockingly, even my draft notes and questions which I had intended to ask witnesses summoned to the Committee, were also seized," he alleged. He claimed that his handwritten notes pertaining to the depositions made to the Committee by witnesses were also seized for reasons best known to the Agency.
Karti Chidambaram alleged that these actions by the CBI, in so far as they relate to "interference with my duties as a Parliamentarian, amount to a direct assault upon democratic principles on which our Parliament is founded".