Chandigarh: A senior Haryana Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader said Saturday that he has met party national president J.P. Nadda twice over the issue of the country’s top wrestlers leading a protest for an immediate arrest of party MP and Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) chairman Brij Bhushan Saran Singh.
The WFI chief faces sexual harassment charges from seven wrestlers, including a minor. He has continued to deny all charges, claiming he will hang himself if found guilty. However, he has not been arrested yet.
Choudhary Birendra Singh, who was a Union minister in the first Narendra Modi government, said to ThePrint over the phone that he told Nadda, “People’s sentiments are with the wrestlers and if the BJP has any political calculations behind its inaction against Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, it will suffer.”
He is one of the few BJP leaders from Haryana to have spoken in favour of the agitating wrestlers led by Vinesh Phogat, Bajrang Punia and Sakshi Malik – the other two being Haryana BJP chief O.P. Dhankar and state Home and Health Minister Anil Vij.
“I met Nadda just days before the Karnataka assembly polls. It was 7 or 8 May, I don’t exactly remember. I told him that this issue is serious and the BJP is going to suffer politically because of this…The BJP president’s response was that he would take it up with the ministries of youth affairs and sports, and home,” he said.
About a week later, Singh said, he reminded Nadda about the issue he had discussed. “I told Nadda unequivocally that if the party has some political calculations in mind for ignoring to take action against Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, then they are mistaken…they will have to pay for this,” he said.
Talking about the contents of the two FIRs against the WFI chief covered widely by the media, Singh said that had such allegations been made against any other individual in an FIR, the police would have immediately arrested them.
“What is even more serious in the contents of the FIR is the fact that the women wrestlers have alleged that they brought this matter of sexual harassment to the notice of Prime Minister Narendra Modi two years ago. This is not a small thing,” he added.
Singh said he has also visited Jantar Mantar to extend his support to the wrestlers.
(Edited by Smriti Sinha)
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