AAP's bad boy: The various controversies of Somnath Bharti

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) MLA and former Law minister of Delhi Somnath Bharti is back in the news. And again, for a wrong reasons. The latest is a written complaint by Bharti’s wife Lipika Mitra to the Delhi Commission for Women (DCW), alleging that her husband had physically and verbally abused her. She has further alleged that Bharti did not support her in taking care of their children. “Me and my children are subject to continuous physical and mental torture by my husband. There is a persistent threat to life from my husband and his supporters. This has been going on since 2010,” Mitra has alleged in her 26-page complaint. Mitra has also accused Bharti of forgery. But, this is not the first time that Bharti’s wife has registered a complaint against him. In 2011 too, she had lodged a domestic abuse complaint against him, with the Delhi Police Cell for crimes against women, which she later withdrew. Even during the 49-day AAP government last year, Bharti had made it to the headlines for wrong reasons. He had then led a midnight raid on a private house in Khirki extension in New Delhi, in which he and his supporters were accused of forcing four Ugandan women to undergo medical tests for proof of narcotics. Bharti had allegedly personally led the raid after the Delhi Police had refused to comply with his instructions. [caption id=“attachment_2292610” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] File photo of Somnath Bharti. PTI[/caption] Several women, mostly from Uganda and Nigeria, had claimed that they had been manhandled by assailants and they were forced to undergo medical tests. Pressing charges of assault and criminal intimidation against those involved in the raid, the Ugandan women had lodged complaints with the police. Nothing adverse was found in the tests conducted on the women. The issue had snowballed into a major controversy and the AAP government faced severe criticism from all quarters. According to AAP insiders, Bharti had been criticized even by a section within the party because of which the Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had to keep his trusted lieutenant away from any ministerial berth after forming the government for the second time. The repercussion of his alleged ‘highhandedness’ against the Ugandan women trickled down at the party level, and there again Bharti had an encounter with one of the founding members of AAP – Madhu Bhaduri. She took up the issue of Bharti’s midnight raid on Ugandan women with the party’s top leadership, and wanted the party to come clean on the controversy. She wanted to move a resolution in the National Council meeting that asked the party to apologize to the women from Uganda and Nigeria for the raid conducted by Bharti and others, and simultaneously disassociate itself from the action of the members and racist comments made by them. Instead, she was heckled and forced out of the hall allegedly by the supporters of Bharti, who were also AAP volunteers, before she could move a resolution in this direction. Bhaduri, a former diplomat, who was then a National Council member of AAP, told Firstpost, “I was heckled in the meeting of the National Council of AAP on 31 January, 2014. In spite of this, the party supported Bharti, which shows the AAP leadership has the same mentality as Khap Panchayats on gender justice. The way the law minister Somnath Bharti went with a mob to raid at midnight showed that the minister hardly cared for gender justice. Popularity of the party takes precedence over justice for women. Later, I resigned.” Shazia Ilmi, another former AAP leader who is now with the BJP said, “AAP hates strong women in the party and wants only ‘Yes boss’ types. Is there any woman at the top in the leadership hierarchy within AAP? And it’s no different in Bharti’s case. Why has the AAP government not yet implemented the promise it made on women security? Will AAP now blame the BJP and Modiji for this or for what Bharti has done?”