Rahul Gandhi demands an SC/ST Act FIR over the Haldwani ground 'purification'

Rahul Gandhi on Saturday asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to order an FIR under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act after a purification ritual at the Haldwani ground where Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge had addressed a rally. Gandhi, speaking at Indira Bhawan in New Delhi, called the act a crime and a form of untouchability banned by the Constitution.

Kharge spoke at the Vijay Shankhnaad rally at Ramlila Maidan in Haldwani on 8 August. Two days later, members of Shri Ram Sena held a shuddhikaran havan at the same public site. Uttarakhand Congress chief Ganesh Godiyal had already asked police to test whether any law was broken. Gandhi said the demand was simple: justice for the Congress president in Uttarakhand, from the state and from the Centre.

The video and the comparisons

Gandhi played a clip of Uttarakhand BJP president Mahendra Bhatt defending the ritual on the ground that the place had been polluted with slogans. He said that if such a rite can be staged against a man of Kharge's age and office, the same logic can be turned on a child in a school. He listed other cases he said followed the same pattern: a purification after Rajasthan Leader of Opposition Tika Ram Jully visited a temple, and a similar rite after Hindustani Awam Morcha leader Jitan Ram Manjhi, a former Bihar chief minister and an NDA ally, entered a temple.

Who does this, Gandhi asked, and answered his own sentence: BJP-RSS people. He said the party was practising untouchability while calling it purification, and that the message was that Dalits should not be touched. He said the incident showed a mindset that does not want Dalits to live with dignity and success. He added that the Congress would pursue the people who performed the Haldwani rite even if the BJP did not act.

The BJP reply

A Union minister, speaking to The Indian Express on Saturday, denied that the BJP as a party had organised the Haldwani havan. That denial matters for the FIR demand. Gandhi wants the Prime Minister to order a case against those who performed the rite, and he tied Bhatt's defence to the party leadership. If the performers are a small outfit acting on its own, the legal file is a local police case. If they acted with party cover, the political file is larger. The video of Bhatt is the piece Gandhi used to close that gap.

No FIR had been announced from Haldwani by Saturday evening. The SC/ST Act can apply where a member of a scheduled caste is insulted or humiliated in public on the ground of caste. Whether a religious rite on a municipal ground after a political rally meets that test is for a magistrate, not for a press conference. Gandhi's move is to force the test into the open.

Why the date is late

The rally was on 8 August. The havan was on 10 August. Gandhi's briefing came on 29 August. The gap is the time it took for the clip of Bhatt, the party line from Dehradun, and a decision in Delhi to treat the episode as a national caste question rather than a local quarrel. Kharge is the first Dalit president of the Congress. A purification of the ground he stood on is, for the party, a statement about him and about every Dalit office-holder who uses a public maidan.

The next document that matters is an FIR number from Haldwani, or a written refusal. Until one of those appears, the record is a demand from the Leader of the Opposition, a defence from the state BJP president, and a public ground that was used twice in three days for two different kinds of fire.