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Journalism of Courage
Haryana BJP chief Mohan Lal Badoli finds himself at the centre of a controversy along with Rocky Mittal, a BJP special publicity cell director-turned-Congressman and singer, after the Himachal Pradesh Police booked the duo on charges of gangrape and criminal intimidation.
According to the police, the alleged offence occurred on July 3, 2023, last year in Kasauli, following which an FIR was registered on December 13 last year.
Both Badoli and Mittal have refuted the allegations, calling them “baseless and politically motivated”.
A month after the BJP saw its tally dip to half in the Lok Sabha elections in Haryana, Badoli was brought in as BJP chief, replacing incumbent CM Nayab Singh Saini.
The party’s Brahmin face, Badoli sat out last October’s Assembly polls to focus on the party’s campaign across the state and eventually led the BJP to a surprise win in the elections.
Associated with the RSS since 1989, Badoli was first elected to the Haryana Assembly from Rai in 2019, defeating the Congress’s Jai Tirath by 2,663 votes, becoming the first-ever BJP MLA to represent the constituency.
Prior to his foray into politics, Badoli ran a shop in the cloth market of Bahalgarh, near Sonipat. In 1995, he was made the mandal adhyaksh of Murthal and in 2000, when the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) was in power in Haryana, he became the first BJP leader to win a zilla parishad election from Murthal.
In 2020, the BJP appointed Badoli as its Sonipat president and the following year, he was made general secretary and inducted into the state BJP’s core team. Ahead of last year’s Lok Sabha polls, he was drafted into the Haryana BJP’s election committee and was preferred over sitting Sonipat MP Ramesh Chander Kaushik as the party’s candidate. However, Badoli lost the poll to Congress’s Satpal Brahmachari by 21,816 votes.
Badoli has declared assets of over Rs 16.3 crore and listed agriculture and business – he owns a petrol pump – as his primary occupations.
Jai Bhagwan Mittal, a.k.a Rocky Mittal, is a Haryanvi singer-composer who claims to have sung over 200 songs eulogising Prime Minister Narendra Modi and over 20 for Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath over the past 14 years, mostly belittling Congress MP Rahul Gandhi.
In 2016, Mittal, who once went by the name “Modi Bhakt singer Rocky Mittal”, was appointed as publicity advisor by then CM Manohar Lal Khattar. However, he was sacked a year later after he accused a senior IAS officer of splurging crores of rupees for an event in Gurgaon. But, soon after, he returned to the CMO as a project director in the newly created special publicity cell. Again, almost three years later, in 2020, he was sacked.
Mittal claimed at the time that he was fired for refusing to make songs against farmers. But senior government officials claimed “nobody had asked him to make songs” and that his “immature conduct” may have led to his ouster.
After his removal, Mittal joined the Congress and in August last year, shared stage with party Rajya Sabha MP Randeep Singh Surjewala in Kaithal, where he performed a song ‘Andha tha andh bhakti mein, thokar maine khai, mujhe maaf karna, Rahul mere bhai (I was a blind devotee, I stumbled. Please forgive me Rahul Gandhi, my brother)”.
