A Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA named Ketki Singh admonished an official on Wednesday, 27 April, in Uttar Pradesh's Ballia for allegedly bulldozing the house of a poor family during a demolition drive. The video of the incident has since gone viral on social media.
"I said one thing to you, why didn't you respect it? You brought a bulldozer? If this is the respect you show, my people will give the same back to you. You used the strength of a bulldozer, we will use the strength of words," the MLA said in Hindi.
Meanwhile, a man sitting next to Singh raged at the official, saying, "When the MLA told you to stop, you should have stopped. What do you think of yourself?" The man also threatened to set fire to the tehsil in response to the demolition in Ballia.
'CM Adityanath Made It Clear That Houses of the Poor Cannot Be Destroyed'
While addressing the press later, Singh said that Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had made it clear that the houses of poor people cannot de destroyed.
"Some people came and told me that officials reached their home without notice and bulldozed it and damaged some parts of it. The family's ancestors had built the house without knowing it was government land. Our chief minister Yogi Adityanath has made it very clear that the homes of the poor cannot be razed," she said.
Meanwhile, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav reacted to the video through a tweet, demanding fair compensation for poor people whose houses have been destroyed by bulldozers.
"In the name of development work, the unaccounted rate at which compensation of crores is being given to people associated with power, the same rate should be given to the common man, especially to those whose legal properties were bulldozed out of malice. Compensation has become a new way of corruption to benefit BJP workers," he said in a tweet in Hindi.
This comes after several demolition drives were undertaken throughout the country to demolish allegedly "illegal" structures, including houses, shops and carts, after communal clashes broke out across the country on the occasions of Ram Navami and Hanuman Jayanti this month.
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