New Delhi, February 12 Opposition MPs staged a protest in the Parliament complex on Thursday over the India-US interim trade deal, accusing the government of "surrendering" Indian interests.
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, AICC general secretaries K C Venugopal and Jairam Ramesh, DMK's TR Baalu, SP's Dharmendra Yadav and Jaya Bachchan, CPI-ML's Sudama Prasad, among others, participated in the protest near the Makar Dwar of Parliament.
Carrying a large banner that read "trap deal" and posters that read "Narendra Surrender", the MPs raised slogans such as "US deal is exploitative" and "stop selling the country".
Later, Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, along with other Congress MPs, including those who had recently been suspended, stood on the steps of Makar Dwar and protested against the government over the deal.
Earlier in the day, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi alleged that the government ignored the voices of workers and farmers while making decisions concerning their future and asked whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi would listen to them now or if there was a "grip" on him too strong.
Gandhi's attack on the government came a day after he alleged that the India-US interim trade deal was a "wholesale surrender", with India's energy security handed over to America and farmers' interests compromised.
In a no-holds-barred attack on the Modi government, Gandhi, while participating in the debate on the Union Budget in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday, claimed that Indian interests had been "surrendered" under the trade deal to protect the BJP's financial architecture.
Criticizing the Indo-US deal, Gandhi drew an analogy of how in martial arts, after securing a grip, the next step is a chokehold, and then the opponent taps to give up.
Gandhi underlined the need to protect the country's people, data, food supply, and energy system.
He said that had an INDIA bloc government negotiated the trade agreement with the US, it would have told President Donald Trump that he must treat India equally.
