Guns out, who are the Uttarakhand MLA, ex-MLA arrested as their rivalry escalates?

While Pranav Singh is a former heavyweight champion in weightlifting who added “Champion” to his name, Kumar who defeated his wife Devyani in the 2022 Assembly elections is a media owner.

Singh is not new to controversies. In June 2019, the BJP suspended him over a dispute with another party MLA and a complaint of misbehaviour with a journalist. The following month, the party expelled him from the party’s primary membership for six years for indiscipline. The action was taken over a video in which he was seen brandishing four guns while dancing. The BJP also condemned the language the MLA purportedly used in the video, which went viral. However, a year later, the BJP revoked the expulsion after Singh provided a written undertaking that he would not indulge in any act of indiscipline.

Singh won his first Assembly election as an Independent in 2002 from Laksar constituency. He subsequently moved to the Congress and won as a Congress nominee in 2007 from the same seat. In 2012, he contested from Khanpur and won. He switched to the BJP in 2016 along with eight other MLAs who revolted against then Chief Minister Harish Rawat. He was disqualified under the anti-defection law but was re-elected from Khanpur in the Assembly elections the following year.

While he remained officially suspended from the BJP, the party gave his wife Kunwarni Devyani the Khanpur ticket in 2022 but she lost to Umesh Kumar and ever since then, the two have been warring on social media.

Kumar is the founder of a media house called Samachar Plus that was established in 2012. He also was the editor-in-chief of Samachar Plus. As per his affidavit, he has 13 FIRs registered against him, including those under sections of rioting, and criminal intimidation, among others. His assets, including his wife’s, are worth Rs 49 crore as of 2022 which rose to Rs 75.4 crore, as per his 2024 affidavit for Lok Sabha polls. Kumar has a media law degree from the London School of Journalism. In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, Kumar, under the name Umesh Kumar Patrakar, unsuccessfully contested from Haridwar.

The social media scuffles between Kumar and Pranav Singh reached the Delhi High Court in December 2023 after Singh held a press conference in which he showed a video of Kumar with a woman. The woman moved the High Court seeking a permanent injunction against publication, communication, and circulation of the videos that she alleged were “false and defamatory”. The woman had told the court that Singh had also posted five other videos of her “from different angles in the comments to the original post”.

The High Court then directed Facebook and other social media companies to take down certain videos. “Despite knowledge of subsistence of the criminal investigation, Kunwar Pranav Singh Champion, organised a press conference on 7th December 2023, wherein he displayed the video in question on his personal computer device, and declared that the same would be circulated across all social media platforms so that the video becomes viral,” the court said in its order.