[ad_1]
JAIPUR/KOTA: Outrage over a nine-year-old Dalit boy’s death after being thrashed by a schoolteacher in Rajasthan’s Jalore for allegedly touching a pitcher of water led 12 Congress councillors in Baran to quit en masse on Tuesday, a day after a Congress MLA from the community set the tone by “heeding the voice of my conscience”.
Amid the gathering storm, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes issued notice to the Ashok Gehlot government, seeking a status report on the circumstances of the Dalit boy’s death. The commission also deputed a fact-finding team to Rajasthan.
MLA Pana Chand Meghwal, who represents Baran-Ataru constituency, had quit on Monday by saying he was “pained” by news of the child’s death in an Ahmedabad hospital last weekend. “If we fail to protect the rights of our community and ensure justice, we have no right to be in office,” he wrote to the CM and the assembly speaker.
Yogendra Mehta, councillor of ward 29 of Baran, said he and 11 colleagues quit their posts to send out the message of zero tolerance towards alleged caste discrimination.
Former deputy CM Sachin Pilot said it was the state government’s responsibility to take stern action against the guilty and ensure such incidents don’t recur. Gehlot suggested the “BJP-orchestrated politics” playing out over the boy’s death had gone too far. “In Jalore, a seer belonging to the SC community died by suicide over alleged harassment by a BJP MLA. Congress did not resort to politics over that death. As for this incident (involving the Dalit boy), the government immediately arrested the schoolteacher”
MLA Meghwal said that it was a shame “atrocities on the downtrodden and the deprived” hadn’t ebbed in the state even after 75 years of the country’s Independence. “The pain of the kind of atrocities my community is facing today cannot be expressed in words,” he wrote.
Amid the gathering storm, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes issued notice to the Ashok Gehlot government, seeking a status report on the circumstances of the Dalit boy’s death. The commission also deputed a fact-finding team to Rajasthan.
MLA Pana Chand Meghwal, who represents Baran-Ataru constituency, had quit on Monday by saying he was “pained” by news of the child’s death in an Ahmedabad hospital last weekend. “If we fail to protect the rights of our community and ensure justice, we have no right to be in office,” he wrote to the CM and the assembly speaker.
Yogendra Mehta, councillor of ward 29 of Baran, said he and 11 colleagues quit their posts to send out the message of zero tolerance towards alleged caste discrimination.
Former deputy CM Sachin Pilot said it was the state government’s responsibility to take stern action against the guilty and ensure such incidents don’t recur. Gehlot suggested the “BJP-orchestrated politics” playing out over the boy’s death had gone too far. “In Jalore, a seer belonging to the SC community died by suicide over alleged harassment by a BJP MLA. Congress did not resort to politics over that death. As for this incident (involving the Dalit boy), the government immediately arrested the schoolteacher”
MLA Meghwal said that it was a shame “atrocities on the downtrodden and the deprived” hadn’t ebbed in the state even after 75 years of the country’s Independence. “The pain of the kind of atrocities my community is facing today cannot be expressed in words,” he wrote.
[ad_2]
Source link