Legal notice to SP chief, others on deputy CM’s behalf, apology sought
Advocate Prashant Singh ‘Atal’, member and former chairman of the Bar Council of Uttar Pradesh, issued the legal notice which says if the Samajwadi Party fails to tender an apology within 15 days, then a defamation lawsuit will be filed.
A legal notice was issued on behalf of deputy chief minister Brajesh Pathak to Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, the SP’s state president and the party’s media cell chief, seeking an apology for the posting of objectionable content on the deputy CM from the party’s official X handle.
The development comes even as Akhilesh Yadav said he has taken an assurance from his people that this will not happen again.
Yadav, however, said Pathak should also refrain from making any comments on DNA of anyone.
Advocate Prashant Singh ‘Atal’, member and former chairman of the Bar Council of Uttar Pradesh, issued the legal notice which says if the Samajwadi Party fails to tender an apology within 15 days, then a defamation lawsuit will be filed.
“We have demanded an apology from Akhilesh Yadav and the Samajwadi Party leaders for the derogatory post on X against deputy CM Brajesh Pathak within 15 days. If the apology is not forthcoming, a defamation lawsuit will be filed against them,” Prashant Singh said.
Meanwhile, in a post on his X handle on Saturday night, the SP chief wrote, “Taking cognizance of the comment of the Deputy Chief Minister of UP, we have asked at the party level and specially those people who lost their temper after being hurt by your ‘extremely indecent comment’ on the DNA of socialists, not to post any such thing again.”
“We have taken this assurance from them that this should not happen in future, but we also hope from you that the kind of statements you have been making continuously will also be stopped. The level of statements you make may seem appropriate to you at your personal level, but they cannot be justified in any way on the scale of dignity and decency of your post,” he further wrote.
“As a health minister, it is expected from you that you must understand that talking obscenely on someone’s personal ‘DNA’ is actually not an accusation on a person but on his original lineage and origin by going back for ages. As everyone knows that we are Yaduvanshis related to Lord Krishna, your attack on our DNA hurts us religiously,” the SP chief’s post read.
“We know that your religious personality is not such that you would make malicious comments against Lord Krishna, but a normal innocent person can take your comment otherwise. Hence, you are requested not to forget your morality while doing politics and hurt sensitive religious sentiments knowingly or unknowingly,” Yadav wrote.
“I hope you apologise to the good person inside you. If you sit alone and objectively observe your behaviour, thoughts and personality of the past years, you will find that neither were there such a deviation in your thoughts before, nor were your political aspirations such that you forget your ideals and lose your verbal balance,” the post read.
The SP chief further asked Pathak to “protect and maintain the purity of politics” and turn his “conscience towards the right direction by maintaining appropriate distance from negative politics.”
On Saturday, BJP Mahanagar president Anand Dwivedi lodged an FIR at the Hazratganj police station against the media cell of Samajwadi Party and those handling the party’s X account for posting the objectionable content on Pathak from the SP’s official X handle.
The FIR was lodged under several sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the IT Act.
The SP media cell has deleted the post, but Pathak has shared its screenshot from his X account.
The controversy began when the Samajwadi Party’s X handle posted a comment targeting Pathak’s DNA, which the the deputy CM responded to strongly.
Pathak questioned the language used by the Samajwadi Party and asked former CM Akhilesh Yadav to make his party workers read about leaders like Ram Manohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan.
In a protest against the remark, BJP workers also torched an effigy of Akhilesh Yadav in Charbagh area in Lucknow on Saturday evening.
