When Amritsar Congress MP Gurjeet Singh Aujla was running with the canister in his hand to throw it out of the Parliament building, he believed it was a bomb. Just when the Parliament dissolved into chaos after the entry of two persons with gas canisters in their hand, MP Aujla ran towards one of the persons and managed to snatch what he thought was a ‘bomb’ from him. Later, he maintained his cool and ran towards the exit of the building to get the ‘bomb’ out of the Parliament house teeming with people. Talking to The Indian Express, the Amritsar MP Aujla said, “Now we all know that these were harmless canisters. But at that time, I took it as an attack on Parliament and these objects as bombs.” I consider this breach as an attack. Someone will have to answer for it.#ParliamentAttack pic.twitter.com/EIgmu08GVE — Gurjeet Singh Aujla (@GurjeetSAujla) December 13, 2023 He said, “Zero hour was about to end when two persons jumped from the balcony. I ran towards the second person when I realized that the first one had been neutralized. The second person managed to get the bomb out. I snatched the bomb from him and ran towards the exit. I found security persons at the exit and handed over the bomb to them. I told them to get it out of the building. At that time, we thought it was a terror attack and the canisters were bombs. I was ready for anything to happen. The object was hot, and it had left impressions on my hand. The Speaker asked me not to wash the hand and wanted me to show it to others.” On what if it were actually a bomb, he said, “In that moment, it was a bomb for me. It was my natural reaction. A Punjabi never runs away from danger, he runs towards it. I just wanted to stop them anyway. I am grateful to tr almighty that he gave me the courage to confront the attackers. We all heaved a sigh of relief when we found out that these were not bombs.” About the attackers, MP Gurjeet Singh Aujla said, “My intuition is that these were not just motivated youth. They were raising slogans about unemployment and other issues. But someone must be behind them. Some organizations had given the threat to do something on the anniversary of the Parliament attack. I don’t want to do politics over it. But it must be properly investigated, and the government should go to the bottom of the incident.” MP Aujla is a self-made politician. He got an opportunity to enter Parliament through a by-election in 2017 after Captain Amarinder Singh resigned from the Lok Sabha to contest the Punjab assembly elections. In fact, Aujla could get the party ticket mainly because the big Congress guns were looking to contest assembly elections, and the Amritsar Lok Sabha seat was least of their concerns. It gave an opportunity to Aujla, which he grabbed. Many bigwigs in Congress thought that Aujla would be compromised for some big face in 2019; however, Aujla turned out to be active in Parliament and scored points with his questions in the house during his short term, which strengthened his profile. He never had the support of any big Congress party leader in the state but still managed to flourish, and went on to win the same seat again in 2019 after defeating heavyweight union minister Hardeep Singh Puri in the Modi wave. Even though Puri had been promised a Cabinet berth, Aujla managed to win the seat, getting 444052 votes against 344049 votes cast for Puri. Aujla was also very aggressive during the farmer agitation. He is still in no specific group of the Congress party and tries to walk on his own path.
