Bihar: Expressing outrage over the incident of a temple being cleaned up after Bihar chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi’s visit, union minister Ram Vilas Paswan on Monday called for the arrest of the guilty.
Paswan, who is also a Dalit leader like Manjhi, said, “Untouchability is a crime in the country. It cannot be allowed to take place to even an ordinary citizen. What can be more shameful when a CM says the temple was cleaned up after his visit. It cannot be more shameful than this.”
“He should have immediately called police and asked them to raid the place. He should have sent the guilty to jail,” he told reporters at a function in Delhi.
Paswan’s outburst came a day after Jitan Ram Manjhi set off a controversy by his stunning ‘revelation’ that he had face untouchability even after he took charge as executive head of the state.
This, he said, happened when he visited a temple in Madhubani district of north Bihar in the run up to the August 21 by election for 10 Bihar assembly seats.
“My cabinet colleague Ramlakhan Ram Raman (mines and geology minister) later told me the temple was cleaned and the idol washed after I left the place”, the chief minister said at a gathering here.
Manjhi was speaking at a function organised in the memory of Bihar’s first dalit chief minister Bhola Paswan Shastri. Manjhi is the state’s third dalit CM, veteran JD (U) leader Ram Sunder Das being the second.
The chief minister said it was ironical this kind of thing was still happening. “People who have work with me fall at my feet (oblivious of the fact that I am a dalit). This is the world we live in”, Manjhi said.
However, Manjhi’s party colleague, JD (U) MLC Vinod Kumar Singh, who is from Madhubani, was quick to deny the chief minister’s charge about the alleged unsavoury happening after his temple visit.
“Nothing of the kind happened. The chief minister has been wrongly informed. I can vouch for the fact that the people were very respectful towards him and happy he visited the temple”, Singh told HT.
Recalling the CM’s trip, Singh said Manjhi had lunch at his (JD-U MLC’s) Jhanjharpur residence and stopped at the Parmeshwari temple at Rudrapur on the request of the locals who were happy to have him there.
“I was present there for the next two days and there was absolutely no question of the idol being washed or the temple premises being cleaned”, the JD (U) MLC told HT.
Bihar has some history of dalits being debarred from visiting temples. A dalit woman was allegedly beaten up in July 2012 after she entered a temple in north Bihar’s Begusarai district.
On the flip side, a dalit priest was appointed to perform puja at ‘Mahavir sthan’, Patna’s most famous Hanuman temple, near the Patna junction railway station.
