Congress SC and ST MPs will take the Haldwani 'purification' row to President Murmu

Thirty-two Congress members of Parliament from the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities decided on 7 September to petition President Droupadi Murmu over a ritual held at Haldwani's Ramlila Maidan after party president Mallikarjun Kharge addressed a rally there. Lok Sabha MP Mallu Ravi told reporters at Indira Bhawan that the group would submit the memorandum on Tuesday, 8 September. The MPs also resolved to form a parliamentary SC/ST forum. K. Raju, the AICC coordinator for those departments, and Rajendra Pal Gautam, who chairs the SC department, sat in the three-hour meeting.

Kharge spoke at the ground on 8 August. On 11 August, members of Shri Ram Sena Dharmarth Seva Nyas performed what Congress leaders call a shuddhikaran, or purification, using Ganga water and cow urine. Trust president Girish Chandra Pandey has said the rite was aimed at garbage and at slogans he called religiously provocative, not at Kharge's caste. Uttarakhand BJP president Mahendra Bhatt had earlier described the slogans at the rally as pollution of the site. Rahul Gandhi in late August demanded an FIR under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act and asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to order the case.

Ravi called the incident a grave assault on the dignity of SC and ST citizens and an affront to the constitutional ban on untouchability. Gautam said such practices have followed Dalit leaders for decades, from Babu Jagjivan Ram onward. The new forum, he said, will have a secretariat. Raju said the forum's next sitting will set a parliamentary strategy. National Herald reported that Congress units in Punjab and Uttarakhand have already taken the issue onto the street, with an eye on the 2027 assembly elections in both states.

A petition to the President does not register an FIR. It puts the head of state, who is herself from a Scheduled Tribe community, on the record as the addressee of a caste-atrocity complaint that the Uttarakhand police have not treated as such. That is the political design. Murmu can forward the memorandum, ask for a report, or let it sit. Any of those choices will be read in Haldwani, Dehradun and the Lok Sabha.

The legal file remains thin. No public order from the Haldwani police has accepted the Atrocities Act theory. The trust that held the havan denies a caste motive. The Congress has now moved the argument from a party briefing room to Raisina Hill. Thirty-two signatures on a presidential memorandum will not, by themselves, produce charges. They will force the President's office to write something back. That reply, or the absence of one, is the next fact in the story.

Kharge is the first Dalit president of the Congress. The ground in Haldwani is a public maidan. The distance between those two sentences is what the MPs say the cow-urine rite tried to mark. Whether a court ever tests that claim depends on an FIR that does not yet exist. Tuesday's envelope at Rashtrapati Bhavan is the attempt to make that absence visible.