Raipur: 29 men held for nude protest near Vidhan Sabha

As MLAs drove in on the opening day of the four-day monsoon session of the Assembly on Tuesday morning, the protesting men ran bare on the road, holding placards demanding action against government employees who got jobs based on alleged fake caste certificates.

The issue goes back to 2020, when a high-level committee was constituted to verify government jobs allegedly given on fake caste certificates between 2000 and 2020. The committee had scrutinised caste certificates of 758 government officials and found 267 certificates to be fake. In November 2020, the General Administration Department had written to the additional chief secretary to act on the committee’s report.

“It is a sad state of affairs that [people from] Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe [communities] have to run naked on the road to seek the government’s attention on the issue,” Degree Prasad Chouhan, Dalit activist and state president of People Union for Civil Liberties, said.

Before his arrest, one of the protesters said, “We want 267 government servants who used fake certificates to be arrested and their property attached. We went on hunger striker earlier but no action was taken. We are ready to go to any limits for this.”