Uma Bharti vandalises liquor store in Bhopal, gives admin a week to shut it

In a series of tweets in Hindi, she said: “It is a locality of labourers. There is a temple and a school near where the alcohol shop is located. When women come to their terraces in the evening, drunk men urinate by turning in their direction to embarrass them. Labourers spend all their earnings on alcohol. The women of this locality have already held protests to remove the shop which is illegally running here. But the district administration has failed to do so.”

The former Madhya Pradesh chief minister warned the Bhopal district administration to remove the shops within a week, tweeting: “I give a week’s time to the district administration to remove the liquor shop and its verandas.”

The BJP, meanwhile, distanced itself from Bharti’s action. “It’s her personal campaign which she has been running to prohibit liquor in the state,” said state spokesperson Hitesh Bajpai in a video. “Besides, she is clarifying why she has done that. Her move has nothing to do with the BJP as the party is not running any such campaign against liquor.”

Three days before the incident, on March 10, Bharti met Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan demanding prohibition.

In a series of tweets after the meeting, Chouhan said, “I have spoken with Uma Bharti ji over alcohol and deaddiction. I have urged that to make Madhya Pradesh alcohol-free, the state government, public representatives, citizens and social groups should run public awareness campaigns and that she should support these.”

Bharti had also announced recently that she would launch a protest outside liquor shops.

Last year, she had declared that she would “hit the streets with a stick” if the state does not ban liquor by January 15.

Two days after this “deadline”, the Madhya Pradesh government slashed excise duty on foreign liquor by 10-13 per cent, making it cheaper.

At present, there are 2,544 country liquor and 1,061 foreign liquor shops in the state.