
Sule criticises Maharashtra govt over rise in crime, alleges ₹4,900 cr scam in Ladki Bahin scheme
Speaking to reporters here, the Baramati MP claimed that a ₹4,900 crore scam had taken place in the Majhi Ladki Bahin Yogana, the government's flagship scheme that provides a monthly assistance of ₹1,500 to women.
She said parts of the state, including Pune and Beed districts, have witnessed a steady surge in crimes, while the government remains a mute spectator.
"People have lost faith in the system. There is no fear of the law. Who is backing these criminals? Instead of looking into these questions, the government chooses to stay silent," she said.
Sule criticised the delay in the formation of a special investigation team (SIT) to probe the 2022 murder of Parli-based businessman Mahadev Munde.
"Only after Munde's wife, Dnyaneshwari, attempted self-immolation and met Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, did the government act. We demand a fair and transparent probe by the SIT," she said.
Sule also raised concerns about the recent communal unrest at Yavat in Daund tehsil, where groups of persons, angered by a social media post, vandalised and set ablaze properties.
"This is a sensitive region. Political leaders and outsiders coming in and inciting unrest are unacceptable. I urge the chief minister and deputy chief ministers to control their people," she said.
Sule urged Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar, also the guardian minister of Pune, to ensure peace and communal harmony in Daund.
"We have deep roots in Daund. Let's not allow outsiders to disturb its social fabric," she said.
Maharashtra has become an example of how power and money can derail governance, she claimed.
"There is a ₹4,900-crore scam in the Ladki Bahin scheme. Farmers are committing suicide, and yet the government is focused on self-promotion," she alleged.
Maharashtra Women and Child Development Minister Aditi Tatkare recently admitted that nearly 26.34 lakh ineligible persons, including men, were availing benefits of the Ladki Bahin scheme.
On Fadnavis's recent remarks about rising hooliganism in Pune, Sule said, "If you acknowledge there's a law and order issue, what action have you taken? Who is protecting these contractors and gangsters?"
She also flagged irregularities in the Election Commission's handling of voter rolls in Bihar, demanding a detailed discussion in the Parliament on electoral transparency and accountability.

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Mint
9 minutes ago
- Mint
Netanyahu worries over ‘horrific' videos, Hamas says will allow aid for hostages if...; outrage over al-Aqsa visit
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed worry over a "horrific" video released by Hamas last week, showing two emaciated Israeli captives. He also urged the Red Cross to give humanitarian assistance to the hostages during a conversation with the head of the Swiss-based ICRC's local delegation. 1. After Netanyahu's appeal, Hamas said on Sunday it was prepared to coordinate with the Red Cross to deliver aid to hostages it holds in Gaza, if Israel meets certain conditions. 2. Hamas said any coordination with the Red Cross is contingent upon Israel permanently opening humanitarian corridors and halting airstrikes during the distribution of aid. 3. On Saturday, Hamas released its second video in two days of Israeli hostage Evyatar David. In the video, David, skeletally thin, is shown digging a hole that, he says in the video, is for his own grave. The arm of the individual holding the camera, which can be seen in the frame, is a regular width. 4. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday he had asked the Red Cross to give humanitarian assistance to the hostages during a conversation with the head of the Swiss-based ICRC's local delegation. 5. In a video message posted on X, Netanyahu said, 'Dear citizens of Israel, like you, I was horrified yesterday. I saw the horrific videos of our dear boys, Rom and Evyatar. I called their families, embraced them on my behalf and on behalf of my wife, and also on your behalf.' Netanyahu said on X that Hamas "doesn't want a deal. It wants to break us through these horrific videos, through the false horror propaganda it spreads around the world." 6. Netanyahu reiterated, "I am filled with even stronger determination to free our kidnapped sons, to eliminate Hamas, and to ensure that Gaza will no longer pose a threat to the State of Israel." 7. According to Israeli officials, 50 hostages now remain in Gaza, only 20 of whom are believed to be alive. Hamas, thus far, has barred humanitarian organisations from having any kind of access to the hostages, and families have little or no details of their conditions, Reuters reported. 8. The UN Security Council will hold an emergency session on the hostages in Gaza, Israel's ambassador said Sunday, as outrage built over their fate in the war-torn enclave, where experts say a famine is unfolding. 9. The Hamas-run Gaza government media office said on Sunday that nearly 1,600 aid trucks had arrived since Israel eased restrictions late in July. However, witnesses and Hamas sources said many of those trucks have been looted by desperate displaced people and armed gangs. 10. Meanwhile, Israel's far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir visited the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem and prayed there, violating a decades-old arrangement covering one of the most sensitive sites in the Middle East. Photos and videos of his visit show Ben-Gvir leading Jewish prayers at the compound, which is known by Jews as the Temple Mount, in occupied East Jerusalem. Praying at the site breaks a long-time arrangement that allows Jews to visit the site but not pray, the BBC reported.


Indian Express
9 minutes ago
- Indian Express
Congress and the OBCs
Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi last month admitted that the Congress had 'fallen short' in its relationship with Other Backward Classes (OBCs), which allowed the BJP to build political support among these communities. 'I do feel that when it came to OBCs, the Congress party's understanding of their issues, the challenges they were facing and the type of actions that the party should have and could have taken, we fell short,' Rahul said at a gathering of his party's MPs and Telangana leadership on July 24. 'We opened the space for the BJP because we were not responsive to the aspirations, to the desires of the OBCs,' he said. Rahul was not wrong. Congress has indeed missed several opportunities to reach out to these castes. It has also failed to claim credit for policy changes with regard to OBCs that were, in fact, initiated by Congress governments. Here's a short history. Inaction on Kalelkar report The clamour for greater political representation for the backward classes, as well as demands for reservation for these communities on the lines of the quotas in government jobs for the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs), began soon after Independence. In 1953, the government of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru set up the first Backward Classes Commission under Rajya Sabha member Dattatreya Balkrishna Kalelkar, popularly known as 'Kaka' Kalelkar. The Kalelkar Commission report, submitted to the government on March 30, 1955, formulated criteria for identifying socially and educationally backward classes, and made several recommendations for their uplift. These included a caste census in 1961 that was to be advanced to 1957, treating all women as a class as 'backward', and reserving 70% seats in technical and professional institutions for qualified students from backward classes. The recommendations were, however, not unanimous, and three of the members were opposed to the acceptance of caste as a criterion for social backwardness and reservation in government jobs. Kalelkar himself wrote a long letter to President Rajendra Prasad expressing his disagreement on a number of issues. The report was tabled before both houses of Parliament but never discussed. Nehru's government did not implement it. First quota for OBCs Meanwhile, OBCs in the Hindi heartland had already begun to move towards the socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia. Until Lohia's untimely demise in 1967, his anti-Congress politics was powered by these communities. By the 1970s, OBC politics had gained significant momentum to pressure state governments to take decisions regarding OBC reservation. For instance, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna in October 1975 appointed the Most Backward Classes Commission under the chairmanship of Chhedi Lal Sathi. This first push for an OBC quota in UP came under a Congress government. And it was another Congress government, of Chief Minister N D Tiwari, that the state cabinet announced a 15% quota in government jobs for OBCs in UP, in April 1977. Within a week of this decision, however, Tiwari's government was dismissed by the Janata Party government of Prime Minister Morarji Desai that had routed the Congress in the Hindi heartland in the post-Emergency elections of March 1977. As a result, it was the Janata government in UP, led by Ram Naresh Yadav, which ultimately implemented the OBC quota — and also took the credit for it. The Mandal challenge In 1978, Prime Minister Desai constituted a new commission for the OBCs. The Second OBC Commission, headed by former Bihar Chief Minister B P Mandal, submitted its report to the government on December 31, 1980. By this time, the Congress under Indira Gandhi was back in power. Over the next nine years, however, neither Indira nor her son and successor Rajiv Gandhi implemented the Mandal Commission report, which recommended a 27% quota for OBCs in central government jobs and public universities. It was only in 1990, that the government of Prime Minister V P Singh announced its intention to implement the report, unleashing a wave of OBC assertion and fundamentally altering the politics of North India — to the Congress' detriment. In his 2006 biography of V P Singh, Manzil Se Zyada Safar, Ram Bahadur Rai quoted the former PM as having said: 'Congress leaders were obsessed with power equations. They were least concerned with the social equations and changes taking place… and thus unable to read the Mandal phenomenon.' The BJP, at that time still considered a largely Brahmin-Bania party, however, was far more flexible. For instance, it projected OBC leaders such as Kalyan Singh, a Lodh Rajput, in UP, to counter Mulayam. As Mulayam's support base outside the Samajwadi Party's Yadav-Muslim core started to fragment, Kalyan rallied smaller OBC communities behind the BJP, eventually forging a non-Yadav OBC vote bank. The BJP would eventually revamp its leadership at every level to accommodate OBCs politically. This was crucial from the late 1990s onwards, as the Panchayat Raj Act and reservation of seats in every level of three-tier rural and urban panchayats, provided an avenue for many OBC leaders to emerge from the grassroots. This was even as Congress' organisation continued to erode, and struggled to truly accommodate OBC politics. In UPA years In 2006, Union Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh pushed through 27% reservation for OBCs in admissions to central educational institutions, which had been pending since the implementation of the Mandal report. This was one of the biggest decisions in favour of OBCs, and a defining moment in OBC politics — but hardly any political gains accrued to the Congress. In 2010, the UPA-2 government tried to move for a caste census. Then Law Minister Veerappa Moily wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh about collecting caste/ community data in Census 2011. But Home Minister P Chidambaram opposed the decision in Lok Sabha. Singh's government ultimately decided to conduct a full Socio Economic Caste Census (SECC) instead. The SECC data was published in 2016 but remains unavailable today. The Narendra Modi government has said it is 'not reliable'. This means that seven decades after the Kalelkar Commission recommended a caste census, there is still no precise estimate of India's OBC population. Rahul Gandhi's push for a caste census in recent years is an acceptance of the many missed opportunities during decades of Congress rule in the past, and a realignment of the party's politics with a view of taking on the BJP.


New Indian Express
9 minutes ago
- New Indian Express
BJP faces Sangh parivar heat over release of nuns from Chhattisgarh jail
KOZHIKODE: In a major embarrassment to the BJP leadership, strong reactions are pouring in from senior Sangh parivar leaders against the way the party handled the issue related to Chhattisgarh police's arrest of two Malayali nuns for alleged forcible conversion and human trafficking. What irked them is Kerala BJP leadership's posture that their intervention had helped the nuns get bail. The nuns were arrested on July 25 after the intervention of Bajrang Dal workers and were granted bail by the NIA court in Bilaspur on Saturday. BJP state president Rajeev Chandrasekhar was active in the efforts to get them released from jail. 'We don't need police and courts. Political leaders who anticipate votes will decide as to who the culprits are,' Swami Chidananda Puri, founder of the Advaita Ashram in Kolathur, near Kozhikode, said in a Facebook post. Expressing dismay, Hindu Aikya Vedi leader K P Sasikala said withdrawing cases and concluding legal procedure amounted to insulting the legal system. Taking to Facebook, she said there were no godfathers when cases were slapped on leaders including her during the Sabarimala agitations. People like S J R Kumar, T P Senkumar, K Surendran and K S Radhakrishnan faced around one thousand cases at the time, she said. 'We didn't approach anyone to withdraw the cases and will not do so in future too,' Sasikala said. Senkumar, a former state police chief, was more sarcastic in his remark. 'It was the Herculean task of Kerala BJP president Rajeev Chandrasekhar and his team that fetched bail for the nuns. We can expect their help in getting the case quashed,' he wrote on Facebook.