NEW DELHI: The
Aam Aadmi Party denied
accusations
of “physical assault” levelled against its MLAs by chief secretary
Anshu Prakash and claimed that the
legislators
had, in fact, “pleaded with folded hands” for him to return to the meeting at the CM’s residence that he had left midway on Monday night. The party, however, accepted that there were heated arguments between the MLAs and the bureaucrat over distribution of ration in the city.
Chief minister
Arvind Kejriwal was present at the meeting, but maintained silence on the controversy. Deputy CM
Manish Sisodia
, however, reiterated that the chief secretary’s allegations were “baseless”. An AAP leader characterised the incident as the deliberate attempts of some “bureaucrats who are acting at the behest of BJP to destabilise the government the people elected”.
AAP MLAs explained that having failed to get an appointment with the chief secretary in the past fortnight to discuss the ration issue despite repeated requests, they had apprised the CM, who had, therefore, asked Prakash to meet the MLAs at his residence.
Amanatullah Khan
denied
allegation in Prakash’s FIR that he had rained blows on the bureaucrat. Khan said, “We wanted to know from the chief secretary why there was a delay in the door-to-door delivery of ration and why people were not getting ration. Instead he got angry and left the meeting midway.”
Countering allegations by Prakash that some MLAs had threatened to implicate him in false cases, Deoli MLA Prakash Jarwal said it was the bureaucrat who had used “derogatory casteist remarks”. “Angered when we asked him why people were not getting ration, he used foul language about my caste,” claimed Jarwal. His colleague, Ajay Dutt, MLA of Ambedkar Nagar, made similar allegations, and the two legislators lodged two different police cases against Prakash on Tuesday under the SC/ST Act.
AAP said it is ready for an independent inquiry into what had happened at the CM’s residence. “There are allegations and counter allegations. An independent inquiry should be carried out,” said party leader Ashish Khetan. “But in the meantime, governance and administration cannot suffer. There have been threats both about the secretariat not being allowed to function and the state government being pulled down.”
Claiming that no work could be carried out in the Delhi Secretariat on Tuesday, a government official commented, “The elected government and the bureaucrats are both answerable to Delhi’s people and cannot shelve them.” Later at a press conference, Khetan said Union home minister Rajnath Singh had “already pronounced AAP guilty”, citing his tweet which said “he was deeply pained by the happenings involving the chief secretary of Delhi, and the civil servants should be allowed to work with dignity and without fear”.