A fortnight after Dadra and Nagar Haveli's Member of Parliament Mohan Delkar, 58, committed suicide at a city hotel, the Mumbai police on Tuesday registered an offence against several officials of the Union Territory, including administrator Praful Khoda Patel.
In his suicide note, Delkar had alleged harassment at the hands of officials, which drove him to take the extreme step.
The development comes in the midst of a surcharged political atmosphere with the ruling party and the opposition at loggerheads.
At the core of the simmering feud are two cases, both unconnected and yet getting intertwined in the game of shadow boxing that is on between the MVA dispensation and the BJP. One is Delkar’s suicide and the other is the murder of the SUV owner in which a police officer Sachin Vaze is allegedly involved.
The FIR was registered on the complaint of Delkar's son Abhinav who, along with his mother, met Chief Minister and Home Minister on Tuesday.
In his statement, Abhinav stated that his father, a seven-time MP, was allegedly harassed by local officials. He was specifically kept away from government functions to tarnish his public image as a sitting MP. All this was done allegedly on the orders of the administrator, Abhinav has charged in the statement.
The FIR copy is in the possession of the Free Press Journal, which cites several incidents when Abhinav’s father was purportedly slighted. His father told him that attempts were made to wrest control of his college and he was asked to cough up Rs 25 crore, if he did not want to be booked in false cases.
The FIR was registered at Marine Drive police station on Tuesday night, hours after the Home Minster announced an SIT probe into the case. The FIR has been registered under the relevant IPC sections, including the ones on abetment of suicide and criminal intimidation.
Apart from Patel, the eight others named in the FIR are collector Sandip Singh, then superintendent of police Sharad Darade, deputy collector Apurva Sharma, sub divisional officer Manasvi Jain, police inspector Manoj Patel and others.
