I think, AAP is going through a bad phase. Opposition is not leaving any stone unturned to trap them and Congress is trying hard to eliminate this party. However, AAP’s ministers and leaders too are responsible for damaging the party’s reputation. In yet another embarrassment for the ruling Aam Aadmi Party ,the wife of a senior party leader Somnath Bharti approached the Delhi Commission for Women, accusing the Malviya Nagar legislator of domestic abuse. The DCW has issued a notice to Bharti after his wife, Lipika, filed a case against her husband, a former Law Minister in the first AAP government. This is not the first time Somnath Bharti is dragged into controversy. During the first Arvind Kejriwal government last year, Bharti had courted controversy for his midnight crackdown on African nationals in his constituency. The complaint against Bharti came a day after Delhi Law Minister Jitendra Singh Tomar resigned following his arrest in fake degrees case.
He was elected as the AAP candidate for the Malviya Nagar constituency in the Delhi state assembly elections, 2013 and was Minister of Law, Tourism, Administrative Reforms, Art & Culture in the Government of Delhi. In January 2014, during his time in office, Bharti revealed the identity of a Danish tourist who had been raped, despite such identification being illegal in India. The government’s resignation, led by Arvind Kejriwal, pre-empted a personal resignation by Bharti in response to accusations of vigilantism. Some residents in the Khirkee Extension area of Delhi had complained to Bharti about a drug and prostitution racket allegedly being run by African nationals. In January 2014, he and some AAP workers, together with television camera crews, visited the area. Bharti and his supporters asked the police to raid the homes rented by Africans. When the police refused to do so, citing a lack of a warrant, a group led by Bharti allegedly caught four women and forced them to give urine tests. The tests conducted at AIIMS did not find any drug traces in their system. The women alleged that they had been threatened and molested by the mob.
Bharti, calling the women’s allegations false and stating that his actions were not racist and residents had complained about the criminal activities by Africans in the area. Kejriwal demanded the suspension of the police officers who had refused to conduct the raid. A court directed the police to lodge a First Information Report against the mob, and the Delhi Commission for Women also opened an investigation into the matter. Kejriwal’s government had come under increasing political pressure to act against Bharti in the hours preceding its resignation. An independent judicial inquiry conducted on behalf of the Lieutenant-Governor of Delhi announced on 28 February 2014 that the police had been correct not to accede to Bharti’s demands and that he should not have then taken the law into his own hands by leading the raid. The police investigation into the events is not expected to report until 26 March 2014.
In June 2012, Bharti was involved in a campaign against the alleged interference of the then Minister of Human Resources and Development, Kapil Sibal, in the Joint Entrance Examination process for admission to Indian Institutes of Technology. The government later partially withdrew the proposal. In 2010-2013, he appeared in news for defending the rights of homeschooled children and subscribers of alternate education system in view of the binding provision of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act through Public Interest Litigations filed in Delhi High Court thrice. In response to his PILs, the Ministry of Human Resources and Development, through an affidavit, clarified that they are not against homeschooling.
Somnath Bharti ran a Delhi-based IT firm, Madgen Solutions. The Spamhaus Project accused him of spamming on behalf of TopSites LLC, naming him in Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) as one of the top spam operators in the world. According to Bharti, he was listed in ROKSO after an Open Directory Project editor Conrad Longmore ran a story on him. Responding to a PCQuest investigation in 2005, he insisted that all the e-mails sent by his company complied with the laws and regulations. PCQuest found that he had been sued in a California Superior Court for spamming by Daniel Balsam. Bharti and two others had paid Balsam in damages apart from making a court declaration agreeing to use only confirmed opt-in e-mail addresses when sending commercial e-mails. Bharti defended himself by saying that he chose to settle because defending the case in the United States would have been costlier for him.
On Tuesday, his wife has levelled serious charges against him and has approached the Delhi Commission for Women. Bharti has been accused of assault and domestic violence. Wife accused Bharti for harassing children and beating her. Wife is distressed and said that she was beaten, verbally abused and given death threats. She further stated that she can’t explain the pain she is going through in couple of words. She told that it’s been going on since 2010. She wants to opt out from this marriage.
Let’s see where these controversy leads to or when the matter settles.
