Elderly farmer arrested on MP officer’s order, demands justice

An elderly farmer, who was arrested on a district collector’s order, has threatened selfimmolation with his family, if he is not given justice. The Congress has called it a glaring example of undeclared emergency in Madhya Pradesh.

PK Purohit (61), a resident of Khurpa village in Narsinghpur district, 241 km south west of Bhopal, has demanded a high-level inquiry into the circumstances leading to his arrest.

State Congress president Kamal Nath tweeted that there was undeclared emergency in the state and said elderly people get jail for raising demand for construction of a road.

Purohit said he had been raising the issue of road construction for the past two years. He lodged a complaint on CM Helpline about a month back. He then got a call from an officer who asked him to lodge his complaint with the collector and he appeared before collector Abhay Verma on August 21. “The collector asked me to meet the PWD authority concerned. Since the official was not in office I went back to the collector and told him that it was only he who could get the road constructed. The collector got agitated and ordered his staff to send me to jail. I had to stay in jail for 4 days. District administration denied bail to me for four days,” said Purohit on phone.

Verma said the complainant was creating a ruckus in an intoxicated state. Hence, action was taken against him. Purohit lodged a police complaint on August 25. SP Narsinghpur Dharmendra Singh Bhadoriya said police were looking into Purohit’s complaint.

Leader of Opposition in state assembly Ajay Singh said he had written to the CM and chairman of MP Human Rights Commission to take action against collector on violation of human rights.

State BJP spokesperson Rajneesh Agrawal said, “I will not comment on the issue as an inquiry is going on in the case.”

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