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Congress worker booked over ‘PayCM’ T-shirt
A video of police purportedly manhandling a Congress worker, forcefully removing his t-shirt, with an assistant sub-inspector rank officer pushing and punching him was widely circulated on social media on Saturday, prompting senior leader Siddaramaiah demanding action against the police officer.
A Congress party worker was booked on Saturday for donning a t-shirt with ‘PayCM’ printed on it during party leader Rahul Gandhi’s ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’ in Karnataka’s Chamarajanagar district.
A video of police purportedly manhandling a Congress worker, forcefully removing his t-shirt, with an assistant sub-inspector rank officer pushing and punching him was widely circulated on social media on Saturday, prompting senior leader Siddaramaiah demanding action against the police officer.
“I condemn the act of rowdyism by the police on our party worker who was wearing #PayCM shirt,” Siddaramaiah, the leader of the opposition in Karnataka assembly, tweeted. “I urge @CMofKarnataka to immediately suspend this rowdy police.”
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Hours after the incident, police said they have booked Congress worker Akshay Kumar from Vijayapura district under sections 505(1)(B) (with intent to cause, or which is likely to cause, fear or alarm to the public, or to any section of the public whereby any person may be induced to commit an offence against the state) and 507 (criminal intimidation by an anonymous communication) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
A first information report (FIR) was registered against the Congress worker based in a complaint filed by an official of the Gundlupet Taluk civic body, alleging the t-shirt was an insult to chief minister Basavaraj Bommai.
HT cannot independently verify the authenticity of the video.
The ‘PayCM’ campaign of the Congress targets the state government on the issue of corruption.
Earlier, Bengaluru police arrested five Congress workers for putting up ‘PayCM’ posters in the city. The QR code in the posters has a link to a website — ‘40% Sarkara’. The website was set up to receive complaints against corrupt state officials, Congress leaders had said. The ‘40 % Sarkara’ jibe is a reference to allegations by Karnataka contractors who claim that 40% of the tender amount for state-funded infrastructure projects was allegedly taken as a bribe by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders and officials.
In a separate complaint, a group of BJP workers at Gundalpet in Chamarajanagar submitted a letter to Bandipur Tiger Reserve authorities, demanding action against senior Congress leaders Rahul Gandhi and Siddaramaiah for allegedly getting out of their vehicles inside the reserved forest during the ongoing ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’.
The forest department is yet to register a case in this regard.
On Friday, thousands of Congress workers welcomed Gandhi, whose yatra entered Karnataka from Tamil Nadu. Senior leader DK Shivakumar was also present on the occasion. Gandhi met Siddaramaiah at Hunasemara Road after his yatra entered the state in Bandipur Tiger Reserve.
Meanwhile, the Congress on Saturday slammed the BJP for putting up front-page advertisements in some vernacular dailies in Karnataka, calling country’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru “the grandfather of India’s Partition”.
With a map dividing Pakistan and Bangladesh in the middle of Nehru’s and Rahul Gandhi’s photographs, the advertisement put out by the state-unit of BJP asked: “Can the great-grandson unite what the ‘grandfather of India partition’ did?”
The advertisement further asks: “Can the unity of India be possible from a party, which caused the bloodbath of the citizens only to come to power?”
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The BJP alleged that the agenda of ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’ (March to unite India) was to disintegrate India. However, the Congress took strong exception to the advertisement.
“The BJP gave the advertisement. The right-wing ideology has always been on the wrong side of history,” Congress’s media and publicity in-charge Pawan Khera told reporters. “Since they could not write history, they are trying to rewrite history.”
Former CM Siddaramaiah, who was also present with Khera, added the BJP was teaching history to those who brought Independence.
“Which party united all the provinces and made one nation? It’s Congress. Which RSS leader participated in the freedom struggle? Did RSS founder Keshav Baliram Hedgewar or the second Sarsangh Chalak Madhav Sadashivrao Golwalkar participated in the freedom struggle?” claimed Siddaramaiah. “Has anybody from RSS died in the freedom struggle? Now, these people are taking history lessons for the Congress.”
