Tags:
Journalism of Courage
The second minister asked to resign from the Bhagwant Singh Mann government in 10 months, Fauja Singh Sarari, 62, retired as a sub-inspector after 36 years in the police force, and joined the ruling Aam Aam Party (AAP) months later, before going on to win from Guruharsahai in Ferozepur by an impressive margin.
In July last year, Sarari was inducted into the Cabinet and was given portfolios covering freedom fighters, defence services welfare, food processing and horticulture.
While Sarari had tried to brazen past the controversy over the extortion allegations against him arising from a leaked audio tape, there were enough indications that the Mann government was unhappy with him. The Chief Minister had assured action on the matter at their last appearance together, and not been seen with him in public since.
The delay in action had grown more and more untenable as in May last year, the Mann government had asked Vijay Singla to resign as health minister over another clip, though that was not even in the public domain.
With Sarari not seen much in his constituency since the tape came out, several there said Saturday they were not surprised at the resignation, only that it had come four months after the said audio tape surfaced.
A father of three, who declared assets of Rs 1.29 crore in his poll declaration, Sarari has maintained his innocence, claiming that the audio was doctored. However, the 1 min-40 sec audio was also hard to live down for the 62-year-old as his OSD, Tarsem Singh, was believed to have put it out.
Singh, who reportedly bore a grudge against the minister for not helping a relative in a police case, has been running a social media campaign against Sarari since the controversy broke.
In the audio, a voice said to be Sarari says commission should be extorted from contractors while they were loading foodgrains for transportation, and that part of it should go to the district food and civil supplies controller.
One factor that might have tied the government’s hands is that Sarari belongs to the Scheduled Caste Rai Sikh community, with influence in at least eight-nine constituencies of Ferozepur and Fazilka districts. In Guruharsahai, from where Sarari won in the 2022 Assembly elections, nearly 70,000 of the 1.72 lakh voters are estimated to be Rai Sikhs.
It’s quite a fall for Sarari, whose poll pitch was that having worked in the police for more than three decades, he knew the loopholes of the system and wanted to fix them. He promised there would be no favouritism under his watch, with strict instructions to officials to take decisions as per merit, and said he wanted to improve literacy levels in his seat.
Having reposed overwhelming faith in the AAP in the elections, voters of Guruharsahai said they have been watching with dismay what transpired with Sarari. They also repeated a claim that can’t be good news for the ruling party: that “like all other AAP MLAs, Sarari too had become inaccessible to people after winning the election”.
