UP minister Vinod Singh aka 'Pandit Singh' hurls 56 abuses at youth

Monday, 25 May 2015 - 6:52am IST | Place: Lucknow | Agency: dna | From the print edition 

 

Deepak Gidwani

 

The minister has denied the charge, calling it a "political conspiracy".

• Image courtesy: Youtube

Abuse of power may be routine where political leaders are involved. But this particular instance, where a UP minister took the phrase rather literally, promises to embarrass even those adept at this rather dubious art.
The minister Vinod Singh aka 'Pandit Singh', who holds charge of secondary education, is alleged to have rattled off an impressive 56 abuses within the two minutes of a largely one-sided conversation he had with a youngster Akash Agarwal of Gonda, from where the minister is an MLA.
The minister has denied the charge, calling it a "political conspiracy".
Akash's "mistake" was that he had dared to post an item appearing in a Hindi daily about the minister on his Facebook account. The news item was about how the local police had got the dark film torn off from the minister's car, an incident which perhaps embarrassed the minister immensely.
As his lackeys informed him of the FB post, the minister reportedly flew into a fit of anger and called up Akash. From the word go, Akash told the media, the minister abused him and his entire family members left, right and centre.
That was not the end of Akash's nightmare. The minister sent policemen and got Akash's father's shop locked up. The cops also got Akash's father to speak with the minister who allegedly threatened him saying he would be sent to jail on trumped-up charges "and would emerge only when you are dead".
For obvious reasons, the Agarwal family got no support from the local police when they tried to file a criminal complaint against the minister.

Akash has now written to the UP Police chief asking for help and protection from the minister and his alleged goons. He has also handed over copies of the audio recording of the minister's abusive conversation to the media.
A prominent social organisation Tahrir has written to the UP Governor and the Chief Minister demanding that the minister be dropped from the Cabinet. "We have also written to the NHRC," Tahrir founder Sanjay Sharma told dna. "We have also demanded registration of FIR against him and his aides for criminal intimidation, insult to modesty of women through abuses and issuing life threats to Akash and his family members," he added.
The minister, however, says the story has been cooked up by his political opponents. "It's a political conspiracy," he told dna.
'Pandit Singh' is no alien to controversy. There are several serious criminal cases against him. In October 2012, he had been dropped from the ministry after he had abducted and thrashed the Gonda Chief Medical Officer (CMO) just because the latter had refused to carry out his diktat on some appointments. But, less than a year later, he was reinstated as a minister.