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Journalism of Courage
Dogra Swabhiman Sangathan chairman Choudhary Lal Singh, whose decision to join the Bharat Jodo Yatra has brought the Jammu and Kashmir leg of Rahul Gandhi’s march under a cloud, has been with both the Congress and BJP and never been far from controversy.
It’s his support for the accused in the 2018 gangrape and murder of an eight-year-old tribal Bakerwal girl in Kathua that is now being used by opponents to attack the Yatra.
A minister in the then BJP-PDP government at the time, Lal Singh had joined a rally organised by the family members of the accused, along with senior Cabinet colleague Chander Parkash Ganga, and supported their demand for a CBI probe into the matter.
Following public outcry over their support to the alleged rapists and murders, both the ministers had been made to resign from the Cabinet.
Among the first to raise the issue after Lal Singh said he would join the Rahul Yatra was Deepika Puskhar Nath, who was the lawyer for the family of the killed girl. Resigning as Congress J&K spokesperson, Nath said she could not share party platform with a person who had “brazenly defended the rapists and murders of an eight-year old tribal girl”.
Pointing to how the incident had been projected by the BJP as a Hindu-vs-Muslim issue, with the accused Hindus, Nath tweeted: “Lal Singh divided the entire region of Jammu & Kashmir to protect the rapists and @bharatjodo is ideologically opposite.”
Former chief minister and National Conference vice-president Omar Abdullah, who will be joining the Yatra in J&K, asked the Congress to not allow Singh to be a part of it.
“… some people might try to use the Yatra to whitewash their past. We have not forgotten the role played by those leaders who tried to save the rapist,” Omar told mediapersons in Srinagar Wednesday.
Ex-CM and PDP president Mehbooba Mufti, however, tweeted Thursday that she backed the cause for which Rahul was walking along with thousands, “to stitch back the fabric of the country”. “It doesn’t matter to me who is joining him, what matters is the motive,” she said, adding that she will be part of the Yatra.
Lal Singh, 63, started his political career as a student leader, and was first elected as an MLA from Basohli in Kathua district in 1986 on a Congress (Tiwari) ticket. In 2002, he won the same seat as a Congress nominee and was inducted as Minister, Health and Medical Education, in a PDP-Congress coalition government.
Lal Singh then moved to the Lok Sabha, winning in 2004 and 2009 from Udhampur. In August 2014, denied a ticket by the Congress, he joined the BJP. This was months after bad mouthing the then BJP prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.
As a BJP candidate from Basohli in the 2014 Assembly elections, Lal Singh again managed to win. This time, as the PDP-BJP formed an alliance government, Lal Singh was again made minister (holding, first, the Health and Medical Education portfolio, and later, Forests and Environment).
Just two weeks after taking oath as minister, he landed in a controversy, with a woman doctor filing a complaint, accusing him of causing her “mental harassment amounting to outraging modesty”. As Health and Medical Education minister, he was caught on camera with his hand on the collar of the doctor, on duty at a government hospital in Kathua’s Lakhanpur.
In May 2016, a group of Gujjars and farmers filed a complaint with the police against Lal Singh, by then forest minister, for allegedly reminding them of the 1947 massacre of Muslims in the region, so as to threaten them. The farmers had gone to him to seek reinstatement of a map that would allow them to transport trees that had fallen on their land.
In June 2018, Lal Singh allegedly threatened mediapersons from Kashmir “to draw a line in their journalism”, reminding them of the killing of a Rising Kashmir editor by militants in Srinagar.
The same year, embarrassed by the support given by Lal Singh and Chander Parkash Ganga to the Kathua rape and murder accused, the BJP had got to resign both as ministers.
While Ganga continued to remain in the BJP, in 2019, Lal Singh quit and floated the Dogra Swabhiman Sangathan. With Article 370 revoked by then, he said his party’s agenda was the creation of a separate Jammu state with constitutional safeguards to residents in respect to land and jobs, and protection against “exploitation” of its natural resources, “especially for Kashmir”.
Eight people, including four policemen and a retired revenue officer, were arrested in connection with the gangrape and subsequent murder of the Bakerwal girl in Rasana forests of Kathua. Of them, six have been sentenced, and one acquitted. The eighth, who claimed to be a juvenile, will now be tried as an adult.
