Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra on Friday accused Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju of threatening her in the Lok Sabha and said that she has written to the Inter-Parliamentary Union about the incident.

“So Kiren Rijiju openly threatens me in Lok Sabha today in complete violation of parliamentary rules and procedure,” Moitra said on social media. “[Speaker Om Birla] says he will get Rijiju’s words deleted but no action yet.”

The Trinamool MP said that she had pointed out the “continued gender harassment and intimidation” in her letter to the Inter-Parliamentary Union.

The Geneva-based union is a global organisation of national parliaments aimed at promoting peace through parliamentary diplomacy and dialogue.

During a debate on 75 years of the Indian Constitution on Friday, Moitra made a remark about the death of judge Brijgopal Harkishan Loya while criticising the Bharatiya Janata Party for allegedly targeting institutions and Opposition leaders to silence dissent.

“Honourable defence minister in a speech this morning mentioned the courage of the late justice HR Khanna to dissent in 1976,” The Times of India quoted Moitra as saying in the Lower House of Parliament. “May I remind everyone, Justice HR Khanna lived for 32 years after 1976 under a largely Congress regime. Long enough to write his autobiography which the minister quoted from. Unlike poor Justice Loya, who is resting in peace long before his time.”

In response, Rijiju accused Moitra of reopening a matter that had been settled by the Supreme Court and warning her of “appropriate parliamentary action”.

“We will take appropriate parliamentary action,” said Rijiju. “You cannot escape. You are setting a very wrong precedent.”

The session was briefly adjourned twice.

After the adjournments, Trinamool Congress MP Saugata Roy and Congress MP KC Venugopal objected to Rijiju’s language and suggested that proper parliamentary procedures should have been followed if there were concerns about what Moitra had said in her speech.

Following this, Birla asked Moitra to verify her statements and addressed Opposition concerns about Rijiju’s remarks towards a woman parliamentarian.

At the time of his death on December 1, 2014, Loya was hearing the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case, in which Amit Shah, the BJP chief at the time, was an accused.

Questions were raised about whether Loya’s death was natural after The Caravan published a report in November 2017, in which the judge’s family said that the circumstances of his demise were suspicious and that he had been under pressure to deliver a favourable judgement. There were demands for the Supreme Court to treat these questions seriously.

In April 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that Loya died of “natural causes”. It said that there was no reason not to believe that the judicial officers who were present with Loya at the time of his death. It accused the petitioners of trying to “malign the judiciary”, called their petitions “scandalous and amounting to criminal contempt” and dismissed pleas for an independent inquiry.

In July 2018, the court dismissed a petition seeking a review of this judgement.