Trinamul Congress MP Mahua Moitra got the BJP’s goat again on Wednesday, triggering frequent interruptions and protests by several ministers, as she accused the ruling establishment and its supporters of targeting anyone who didn’t agree with their views.

The first-time MP, however, made it clear she wouldn’t back down. “I will stand here in this hallowed chamber and spell out my opposition,” she said, speaking in the Lok Sabha on a bill to amend the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, which she described as draconian.

Moitra had endeared herself to a vast section of liberals and angered the BJP by referring to “early signs of fascism” in her debut speech a few days ago.

She rubbed the message in on Wednesday. “Why do I feel a sense of menace?” she said. “Ever since I have been elected and since my maiden speech, why do my friends and family call me and tell me to be careful? ‘They will somehow get you’, why do I feel this?”

As BJP members shouted and heckled her, she added: “You have come here as a result of a popular majority. I too have been elected. All of us here too have been elected. Why we in the Opposition are always at the risk of being called anti-national every time we disagree with this government on issues of national security, on issues of law and order, and on issues of policing? Every time we disagree, this government, its troll armies, its propaganda machinery work overtime to call us terrorist sympathisers, sickular and anti-national.”

The BJP members complained she was imagining things, asserted there were no troll armies of the government and raised a point of order, but Moitra continued: “To paraphrase both the Mahatma and George Orwell, ‘the truth is a truth even if I am a minority of one and in times of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act’.”

She added: “If you are with them, you are bhagwan. If you are not, you’re a shaitan. In the short time that I have been privileged to be here in this House, I have experienced it first-hand. Each time we oppose a bill, bring in a cut motion or move an amendment, we run the risk of being labelled as anti-national. The home minister (Amit Shah) sits in the chair of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. Sardar Patel was the unifier of India. He once said: ‘It is the prime responsibility of every citizen to feel that his country is free, and to defend its freedom is his duty.’ It is not enough to build the world’s tallest statue in Sardar Patel’s honour. All of us must try, at least, to stand as tall as him.”

Cheered by other Opposition members, the Trinamul MP said: “Warren Buffett once said: ‘If you put a police car on anyone’s tail for 500 miles, they are going to get a ticket.’ The current dispensation at the Centre seems to be following this very reasoning. If they want to target someone, they will get them somehow on some law or the other or on some lacuna or the other. The Opposition leaders, rights activists, minorities or anyone who does not agree with the homogenous idea of India that this government is trying to thrust upon us, are at risk.”

Moitra said that being anti-government did not mean being anti-national. “This bill seeks to do two things. One is to designate individuals as terrorists without due process. Second, it enables the NIA (National Investigation Agency) to be able to go into any state and to arrest, seize and search properties without the permission of the state’s DGP or even without the knowledge of the state’s DGP,” she said.

“Now, this is completely against the federal structure of our country. Powers of policing are vested with the state, not the NIA. We are a federal structure. The states have a certain degree of sovereignty.”

Moitra explained the possibility of misuse to make her point. “If any government, which has taken away the safeguards for life and liberty, which the Constitution has given to us… you yourselves have got somebody, who has come in as an elected MP (Pragya Singh Thakur); and I respect the person, who has come in elected as an MP, who is a terror accused under NIA. You say, it was political targeting. Fine. But you are doing the same thing. Tomorrow, it may be targeting of somebody else,” she said.

Thakur is an accused in the 2008 Malegaon blast.

The bill was later passed with home minister Amit Shah defending the tough law and arguing that the country needed to fight terrorists with an iron hand.

“If their vote bank gets angry for voting on an anti-terror bill, let them go out,” Shah said as the Opposition members walked out in protest.