NEW DELHI: A spat broke out between Delhi Commission of Women (DCW) chief Swati Maliwal and Alok Agarwal, Aam Aadmi Party’s convenor of Madhya Pradesh, on social media over a protest on the Kathua gangrape-cum-murder case on Wednesday.
The reason for the war of words was a photo posted by the AAP’s Haryana unit featuring Maliwal’s husband and party’s Haryana convenor, Naveen ‘Jaihind’.A few days ago, the Haryana unit of AAP posted pictures of Jaihind showing the leader clad in white clothes, sitting in meditation and praying. The post stated that the AAP party leader was praying after being deeply affected by incidents of sexual assaults in which the victims were minors. The post was put after the court judgment in the Kathua case.
However, Agarwal tweeted saying, “I urge Arvind Kejriwal to put a stop to such kind of theatrics, this hurts the image of the party and we become a laughing stock.”
Maliwal retorted saying that an infant was brutally raped and Agarwal was behaving “shamelessly” without having the decency to raise his own voice to demand justice in the matter. “You (Agarwal) did not do anything not even raise your voice. If one man, hurt by such incidents is sitting in meditation in these extreme temperatures of 48 degrees then you call it ‘theatrics’. Do something about the rape in Ujjain. The country is like this because of your kind of useless people,” she said.
Agarwal hit back, calling her husband an opportunist. “Navin wore saffron in a press conference then used ‘Jaihind’ in his name to avoid casteist politics but later added ‘Pandit’ in his name. Such politics of symbolism in this age is condemnable. Swati should not lose control over language,” he tweeted.