A former district BJP vice-president was arrested on Tuesday evening for allegedly kicking a labourer on a street, within hours of a man described as a senior BJP leader by his family and Facebook profile being held for assaulting a woman neighbour.
State BJP spokesperson Rakesh Tripathi claimed neither held any official post in the party but stopped short of claiming they were not party members.
Shalyaraj Singh, who was the BJP’s Aligarh district unit vice-president till 2020, was taken into custody after footage, apparently from a private CCTV, was circulated on social media.
It purportedly showed Shalyaraj asking a labourer to remove iron bars from a road in front of an under-renovation hospital in Aligarh city, and then kicking him.
Before his arrest, Shalyaraj told reporters he wanted to “apologise to the labourer” but claimed the man had “misbehaved”. The footage shows the labourer standing in front of Shalyaraj with folded hands.
Aligarh city superintendent of police Kuldeep Singh said the police had taken “suo motu cognisance of the crime and arrested him the same evening”.
A man resembling the person kicked in the video, who didn’t want to be named, told reporters: “I’m just a labourer and carry bricks and iron bars. I told him (Shalyaraj) to ask the contractor, and he kicked me in response.”
Shalyaraj faces charges of breach of peace, punishable with up to two years in jail.
Shrikant Tyagi, whose Facebook profile describes him as a member of the national executive of the BJP Kisan Morcha (farmer wing) and co-coordinator of the party’s Yuva Kisan Samiti (farmer youth wing), has been arrested for breach of peace and outraging a woman’s modesty.
A video shows Tyagi purportedly threatening and hitting a woman who had asked him to remove encroachments from common areas of their housing complex in Noida.
Tyagi purportedly says “I will touch you if you touch my plants” and punches her in the right shoulder.
“I shouldn’t have misbehaved with a woman of the society, where I have my own flat. I apologise to her,” Tyagi told reporters on Tuesday evening before being sent to 14 days’ judicial remand. His bail hearing is on Thursday.
The police had booked Tyagi on Saturday, a day after the video was posted, but he went into hiding. He was arrested on Tuesday from Meerut after the police announced a reward of Rs 25,000 for anyone who helped catch him.
“Neither held any official post in the BJP. The law will deal with them even if they are somehow associated with the party,” Tripathi told The Telegraph.
“The state government has given a free hand to the law-enforcing agencies to arrest and prosecute them.”
Tyagi’s wife Anu insisted her husband was a “BJP leader” who held “two posts in the party”.
Tripathi also disowned Tinku Bhargav, described in some reports as a BJP activist, who was arrested with his nephew on August 4 on murder charges after allegedly shooting and beheading a friend in Agra.