Rahul Gandhi demands SC/ST Act FIR over Haldwani 'shuddhikaran' after Kharge rally

Rahul Gandhi on Saturday asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to order an FIR under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act over a purification ritual held at the Haldwani ground where Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge had spoken three weeks earlier.

Kharge addressed the Vijay Shankhnaad rally at Ramlila Maidan on 8 August. On 10 August, members of the Shri Ram Sena performed a shuddhikaran havan at the same site. Uttarakhand Congress chief Ganesh Godiyal alleged the ritual was aimed at Kharge because he is a Dalit and asked police to test whether any law had been broken. Kharge raised the episode in Parliament on 13 August. Twenty days later, no case has been registered.

Gandhi spoke at Indira Bhawan. He called the ritual a crime under the Constitution and another name for untouchability. "The BJP-RSS people practice untouchability, though it is banned, a crime as per Constitution," he said. "When they do shuddhikaran, they say that Dalits cannot touch as they are impure."

He played a video of Uttarakhand BJP president Mahendra Bhatt defending the ceremony and saying the place had been polluted with slogans. Gandhi used that clip as the party's own evidence. "If such a thing can be done against senior person like Mallikarjun Kharge, imagine what can be done to a four-year-old in a school," he said. He also cited the earlier episode in which former Bihar chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi, also a Dalit, faced a similar purification after visiting a temple.

The demand is specific. Gandhi wants an FIR in Uttarakhand against the people who conducted the havan, under the SC/ST Act, and he wants Modi to order it because the state government has not. "It is the duty of the central and state governments to ensure that Kharge gets justice," he said. He added that the Congress would pursue the case even if the BJP did not act.

Bhatt has not withdrawn the remark about slogans polluting the ground. The BJP has treated the ritual as a local religious act rather than a caste insult. That is the gap Gandhi is trying to close: to move the story from custom to statute. The SC/ST Act treats certain public humiliations of a member of a scheduled caste as offences that police are bound to register. Whether a havan on a public maidan after a Dalit leader's rally meets that test is now a question for a station house officer in Haldwani, if one is told to write the complaint.

The politics are national. Kharge is the first Dalit president of the Congress in decades and the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha. A purification of the ground he used is a ready symbol for a party that has spent two years arguing that the BJP's social coalition still runs on caste exclusion. The BJP's reply, so far, is that no crime occurred and that Congress is stretching a local ceremony.

What has not happened is the FIR. Gandhi's press conference does not create one. It raises the cost of not filing one. The next move sits with Uttarakhand police and with the Prime Minister's Office, which Gandhi has now named as the authority that should give the order.