In a statement that puts her own party’s government in Madhya Pradesh on the spot, Bharatiya Janata Party MP Pragya Thakur recently said that poor people in villages she had adopted were forced to “sell their daughters and give money to the police”.
At an event organised by the Udyog Vyapar Mandal on September 17, Ms. Thakur said she had been supporting the education of poor girls of three villages she had adopted but the people there sold home-brewed liquor for sustenance. “In such a situation, when the police takes them away, they sell daughters to pay the police and rescue those arrested,” she said. The Bhopal MP also said people had nothing to eat in these places.
The statement comes at a time when an alleged scam in the nutrition scheme for children, adolescent girls and women, has rocked the State. The Congress has been aggressive on the issue both inside the Assembly and outside, while Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan had maintained that the audit report findings were not complete.
Days before Ms. Thakur made the remark, State’s Mineral Resources Minister Brajendra Pratap Singh had purportedly written a letter to School Education Minister Inder Singh Parmar alleging that mid-day meals were not distributed in 100 schools in his constituency of Panna for the past six months. The letter is dated September 14 and its contents went viral on Sunday.
Mr. Singh joins the ranks of his Cabinet colleagues Mahendra Singh Sisodia and Brijendra Singh Yadav who had written letters to authorities, documenting their concerns over the functioning of various departments. Mr. Sisodia had even described the bureaucracy led by Chief Secretary Iqbal Singh Bains as unbridled.
