It has been almost seven years since Maharashtra politician Nitish Rane confronted an engineer from the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) over the poor condition of the Mumbai-Goa expressway. On July 4, 2019, while Rane was pushing engineer Prakash Shedekar and shouting at him in Marathi, his supporters poured buckets of mud on his head.
Shedikar was even linked to a bridge near Kankavli in Maharashtra’s Sindhudurg district, where Rane, who was then associated with the Congress, led the attack against the official.
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Rani reportedly called Shedikar to a bridge over the Gad River in Kankavli to inspect the work to widen the Mumbai-Goa Expressway.
Frustrated by poor quality of roadworks and waterlogging, Rani and his followers confronted the engineer, the prosecution told the court on Monday, news agency PTI reported. They poured muddy water on Shedikar and forced him to walk in the mud in public places.
A video clip of the incident appeared on social media and sparked controversy.
Rane, son of former Union minister Narayan Rane, was among 30 people charged on various charges, including rioting, assault to deter a public servant and criminal conspiracy. He was in Congress when the incident happened and later switched to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
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All the accused, including Nitish Rane, were acquitted of these crimes, as the Sindhudurg court did not find sufficient evidence to support most of the allegations. However, Kankavalli MLA was found guilty of assaulting a public servant and deterring him from performing his official duties under Section 504 IPC (intentional insult intended to provoke a breach of the public peace).
“Abuse of power”
As the Sindhudurg court convicted Rane and sentenced him to a month’s imprisonment, it indicated that lawmakers are not supposed to take the law into their own hands.
“Although Rani’s intention was to raise voice against the poor quality of work and inconvenience faced by people, he was not supposed to publicly insult or insult a public servant,” Additional Sessions Judge VS Deshmukh was quoted as saying by news agency PTI.
“If such incidents continue, public officials will not be able to perform their duties with dignity,” the judge noted.
The court described this act as an “abuse of power” and held that “curbing such a trend requires time.”
“deliberate insult”
The court further noted that Shedikar was holding a senior position in NHAI when the incident occurred. “Despite this, he was forced to walk through the muddy water in public. This would certainly have humiliated and humiliated him,” the court noted.
The court held that the act of forcing the engineer to walk in muddy water in itself constituted intentional humiliation of a serving public servant and was sufficient to trigger liability, as stated in an earlier HT report.
It concluded that forcing a public servant to walk through the mud “would certainly have humiliated and humiliated him” and was sufficient to constitute a deliberate insult likely to lead to a breach of the peace.
But the court suspended the ruling, giving Rani a chance to appeal.
When Rani threw a fish at an official
Rani is not new to controversies and the mud controversy was not his first. In 2017, Rani threw a dead fish at a government official during a meeting to discuss problems faced by fishermen when he lost his temper.
An alleged video from the incident shows Rani talking to Sindhudurg Fisheries Commissioner in his crowded office, and suddenly Rani loses his temper. He then picks up a dead fish lying on the official’s desk and throws it at him. He later said that his action was a protest against the official’s “ignorant attitude” towards the problems faced by the traditional fishing community in the Konkan region.
“There are two types of fishermen in Sindhudurg. One uses traditional methods of fishing and the other uses modern technology,” Rani told PTI at the time.
