Kailash Vijayvargiya, senior BJP leader from Madhya Pradesh, is the latest in the party to make critical comments against the State’s bureaucracy and government machinery.
Mr. Vijayvargiya on Thursday questioned the “undue credit” that government officials get for making Indore the cleanest city of India. He was referring to the annual cleanliness survey conducted by the Central government, in which Indore has been bagging the first prize for the past six years.
Addressing participants at a felicitation ceremony for sanitation workers, Mr. Vijayvargiya said that if someone deserved praise, it was the sanitation workers and the people of Indore, in that order, and there was no point in “giving massages to officials”.
“If you will not give credit to the people of Indore, you will only give credit to the officials, then it is wrong. I know that what I am saying sounds bitter. But it is also crucial that I speak, because apart from me, no one has the strength to say this. Don’t give massages to officials. If Indore has been made number one, then the people have made it,” he said.
In the last one month, three State ministers and Bhopal MP Pragya Singh Thakur have raised questions over the administration across ranks. On September 17, Ms. Thakur had said that in three villages she had adopted, people who sold home-brewed liquor for sustenance were forced to sell daughters to pay the police and rescue those arrested. Earlier, the State’s Mineral Resources Minister Brajendra Pratap Singh had purportedly written a letter to School Education Minister Inder Singh Parmar alleging that mid-day meals had not been distributed in 100 schools in his constituency of Panna for the past six months.
Two other Ministers, Mahendra Singh Sisodia and Brijendra Singh Yadav, also wrote letters to the authorities, documenting their concerns over the functioning of various departments, with Mr. Sisodia even describing the bureaucracy led by Chief Secretary Iqbal Singh Bains as “unbridled”.
