LUCKNOW: The list of lecherous legislators grows long in Mayawati’s Uttar Pradesh. Rural Development Minister Daddu Prasad is the newest name in this unholy collection, facing charges of sexual exploitation by a woman from his home district of Chitrakoot.
Twenty-year-old Kamla Kushwaha has alleged Prasad and one of security guards called Angad Yadav raped her for months. Kamla has told the police that she had to have an abortion five times since 2007. Prasad is no stranger to controversy, his name often coming up as an active member of the dreaded dacoit Dadua’s gang. The minister’s high profile seems to have been his saviour for the police did not register a report or conduct Kamla’s medical examination. Even the chief minister defended Prasad, describing the charges as “politically motivated”. Kamla has now moved court for justice.
Mayawati may have had no choice but to defend her cabinet colleague, for half a dozen of MLAs, including some ministers, have already lost their jobs over sexual offences; a similar number have had to go over corruption charges, thanks to Lokayukta N K Mehrotra’s efforts.
The first to go was Anand Sen Yadav, a minister and son of a former MP, whose relationship with Faizabad girl Shashi ended in her kidnapping and murder in 2007. Yadav got a life term in May this year. BSP MLA from Banda, Purushottam Dwivedi, is in jail on charges of illegally confining and raping a minor girl at his residence in December last year. The case is now being probed by the CBI on orders of the Supreme Court. Dwivedi’s defence was that he is impotent. Then there’s Ram Mohan Garg, former chairman of the Fisheries Development Corporation, a position that gave him the status of minister of state, who was forced out in January 2009 over charges of sexually exploiting a young girl with the help of a video he shot five years before. The BSP had then distanced itself from Garg, saying he was no longer a member of the party.
Yogendra Sagar, MLA from Bilsi (Badayun), is another BSP leader facing charges of kidnapping and raping a girl in 2008. A non-bailable warrant is out against him; the party dropped him on charges of indiscipline in September this year. Finally, there’s Bhagwan Sharma alias Guddu Sharma, another ruling party MLA and the man who defeated Kalyan Singh’s son in the battle for the Debai Assembly seat in 2007, who was held for the rape of a research scholar in 2008.
The cesspool of sleaze that the BSP finds itself in is ironic because Mayawati’s juggernaut victory in 2007 is largely believed to because of her promise to rid the state of Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav’s “goonda raj”. That the chief minister of the state is a woman only makes the irony that much more tragic.
Nobody’s forgotten, however, that the BSP fielded no less than 134 tainted candidates in the last Assembly polls and 72 of them became MLAs. The elections to the Legislative Council saw a dozen hardcore criminals in the contest; the 2009 Lok Sabha elections starred notorious criminals like Mukhtar Ansari and Anna Shukla in BSP colours. “Now the same criminals, in the grab of politicians, are showing their true colour and character,” says Ashutosh Mishra, Reader in Political Science at Lucknow University .
To be fair to the BSP, sex and sleaze is not their sole preserve. Amarmani Tripathi, whose footprints span the political spectrum in Uttar Pradesh, had hit the headlines in 2003 for the murder of poetess Madhumita Shukla. A DNA test had nailed him, and he was jailed. Former BJP leader and twice chief minister Kalyan Singh quit in 1999 over the all-round censure for his “closeness” to corporator Kusum Rai. Veteran Congress leader Narain Dutt Tiwari’s ways have been the topic of salacious gossip for year; he now faces a paternity case. Samajwadi leader Mulayam Singh Yadav is widely believed to have married a second time.
Physical exploitation of women in the name of providing them a job or a contract is also a way of life in the state. A senior IPS officer investigating irregularities in police recruitment in the Mulayam Singh Yadav government in 2003 had stunned the state political and officer circles by revealing that female recruits had been exploited by a minister.
Right now, BSP sleaze is making the news. For a state tired of poor law and order, the writing may not be on the wall yet, but it may well be the ballot bomb that Mayawati’s foes so fervently seek.