New Delhi: BJP’s North West Delhi Dalit MP Udit Raj (61) on Wednesday joined the Congress, saying his only crime for denial of the BJP ticket was that he openly endorsed Dalits’ Bharat Bandh on April 2 last year as he cannot be “deaf and dumb” on the issues concerning the Dalits for which he fought for whole of his life.
A 1988-batch IRS officer, Udit Raj quit as an additional commissioner of Income Tax in 2003. He formally joined the Congress after meeting party president Rahul Gandhi at his residence and later welcomed in the party fold at a press conference by Delhi Congress president Sheila Dikshit and others at the AICC headquarters.
He was very frank to note that he would have certainly sought re-election if the BJP had given ticket, but now he will campaign for the Congress to see that Punjab’s poet Hansraj Hans given the ticket in his place from the reserved constituency loses his security deposit.
Click here for latest updates on Lok Sabha Elections 2019
Denial of the BJP ticket came as a big shock to him since he was adjudged the most popular among all seven MPs from Delhi in the party’s internal surveys by four-five agencies and that the BJP will win hands down only in his constituency, he said, stressing that he was refused the ticket since he raised voice from time to time on the government’s anti-Dalit policies. Udit Raj narrated his suffocation in the BJP since he got elected to the Lok Sabha on its ticket in 2014 to find the BJP being anti-Dalit in every aspect.
He narrated how President Ramnath Kovind was turned away by the BJP in 2014 when he wanted to contest election. “Kovind’s silence paid as he was made the President and I would have also become the PM if I had remained dumb and deaf,” he said.
He trashed various schemes of the Modi government for Dalits as farce. He said PM Modi boasted that he wants to make Dalits job-givers by providing them bank loans but in reality only 6% got the loans. When Sheila Dikshit said she knew him for the past two decades, Udit Raj said even Rahul knows that he actually wanted to join the Congress since 2012.
