APRIL 7: BJP MLA from Ramganjmandi in Kota, Madan Dilawar, humiliates a transport inspector over seizure of a truck carrying river sand illegally.
JUNE 5: BJD’s newly elected Patnagarh MLA Saroj Meher makes a PWD Junior Engineer (JE) to do 100 sit-ups in five minutes in full public view for low-quality work in Belpada section of Balangir district.
JUNE 26: Akash Vijayvargiya, BJP MLA from Indore, thrashes a municipal official with a cricket bat over an argument during a demolition drive, in presence of policemen and television crews.
JULY 4: Former BJP MLA, Bhawani Singh Rajawat, forces two young officers of a private power distribution company to do sit-ups in front of people for discrepancy in bills.
These four instances of lawmakers taking law into their hands and “punishing” public servants became topic of drawing room discussions in recent months. Videos of these events ran on televisions channels in a loop. The cringe worthy videos also circulated on social media. Vijayvargiya was arrested and subsequently released on bail. Rajawat was booked in a case. Dilawar and Meher did not face any police action. Even if they do, because they are sitting MLAs, the investigation against them will go to the criminal investigation department crime branch (CID-CB), which essentially means cold storage.
Discussions on these public spectacles had not ended when two more MLAs became topic of news.
BJP MLA from Bareilly (Uttar Pradesh) Rajesh Mishra’s daughter Sakshi moved the Allahabad High Court on July 11 to seek protection to “live a peaceful life” with her husband Ajitesh Kumar. In a video, which news channels played to glory, she alleged there was a threat to her life from her father, brother and an associate because she, a Brahmin, has married a Dalit. The 23-year-old also uploaded a video on a social media platform last week to make her marriage with the 29-year-old public.
In another video, which is undated, BJP MLA from Haridwar (Uttarakhand), Kunwar Pranav Singh Champion, is seen dancing to a Bollywood number with guns and a drink in hand, cursing the state and hurling abuses. The MLA was suspended by the BJP for three months over threatening a reporter for airing a story about a private vehicle being used as a pilot police car.
In all these cases, the lawmakers brazenly defend their acts and people cheer for them as they re-elect them to Assemblies. For people, their acts are not unlawful – at least that’s what it seems with the kind of silence we have over them.
A public representative is elected to a legislature for making laws, not for breaking them. But lawmakers these days also like to play to the gallery and send out a message to their voters that they are powerful and hand out spot justice to errant public servants, having scant regards for the human rights of these government officials.
Is this a new phenomenon? Have lawmakers suddenly become unruly? Have they not been involved in unlawful activities earlier? Answers to all these questions, unfortunately, is ‘no’. We have read so many stories about people with criminal backgrounds getting elected to state Assemblies and the Parliament.
What makes the instances mentioned above different is the spectacle. Mobile phones everywhere has made it possible for people to record such acts for posterity. Imagine if there was no video of Vijayvargiya thrashing the official with a cricket bat, or if there was no video of the Uttarakhand MLA brandishing two pistols and an assault rifle. Police wouldn’t have taken complaints against them under political pressure, and even if it did, it wouldn’t have taken action unless there was public outrage, leading to Prime Minister Narendra Modi also mentioning action against such unruly party men.
Lawmakers and politicians thought themselves as people above law in pre-mobile phone era, too, but because their antics and utterances were not recorded and because there would be no evidence of these acts, they managed to get scot-free. Not that there’s any major action against them now when there are recorded evidences, and not that it makes any difference to their voters who seem unmoved by these acts when they stand in queues outside polling booths to re-elect them. People who are moved by these acts seldom vote.
It is this attitude of voters that gives such unruly men and women the chutzpah to indulge in such public acts time and again.
Only we, the people, have the power to set them right. Unless we start discarding them for better people, they will go on unabated.
