Days After Being Sacked, 16 BBMP Muslim Employees To Be Reinstated, No Action Against Tejasvi Surya, BJP MLAs Yet For False Accusation

Days after they were sacked from their jobs, at the orders of MP Tejasvi Surya and three BJP MLAs, who deliberately targeted them for their religious identity, 16 Muslim employees of BBMP have been reinstated.

While seventeen workers were initially suspended, 16 of them were asked to report back to work. However, only eleven of them chose to return to work. The rest refused to return, saying they had been “targeted”.

The 17th man, Dr Rehan Shahed, a BBMP nodal officer was arrested along with three others including Dr Suresh, the bed allotment in-charge of Bommanahalli War Room. Many of the 16 Muslim employees were hired only few days before, they were asked to be removed by the BJP legislators.

Confirming the decision to reinstate them to The Cognate Tulasi Maddineni, a commissioner in the Bengaluru Municipal Corporation, said that 13 volunteers had come to the South Zone War Room on Saturday and asked to be reinstated as they were falsely targeted and that their livelihoods are at stake.

When this reporter asked if this means, the sixteen were falsely targeted by Surya and the other BJP leaders, she dodged the question. All sixteen of them have been given clean chit by the police.

On Monday, Tejasvi Surya was confronted by reporters during a press meet he convened to list out reforms introduced to BBMP’s Central Hospital Bed Management System (CHBMS). When asked why he read out names of only 17 Muslim staffers among the 205 at the BBMP South Covid-19 war room, he said, “It is true that I went and spoke to people at the war room. Why should I apologize when I have not made any communal remark? I have not apologized to anybody. I just asked why and how these people (Muslim employees whose names he read out) were appointed,” the controversial MP said.

He refused to apologise for falsely accusing the seventeen Muslim employees and for the communal rants of the other BJP leaders.

He further made a fool out of himself, when he said he was given the list to read out and he did.

Last week, Surya accompanied by his uncle and Basavanagudi MLA Ravi Subramanya, Bommanahalli MLA Satish Reddy and Chickpet MLA Uday Garudachar held a press conference accused city municipal officials of accepting bribes to allot hospital beds. They alleged that a “nexus of BBMP officials and frontline health workers” were creating artificial scarcity and that beds were being booked under the name of asymptomatic patients who were in home isolation.

The BJP legislators also picked up on Muslims working in the BBMP COVID war room and took objections to them working there. In the video of the incident that has since gone viral, they were seen barging into a BBMP COVID war room and asking officers present if BBMP was a Hajj Bhavan or a Madrasa to recruit Muslims.

The South zone war room has 205 designates telecallers, of which only 17 were Muslims. In the video, Surya is seen asking the BBMP official what process was followed to recruit the volunteers in the COVID war room, and read out a list of 17 people, who all happened to be Muslims. Surya, Reddy, and the other BJP leaders were seen asking officials to remove the Muslim employees from the war room.

The 17 people were sacked immediately.

A news report by Vijay Karnataka, however, has accused Reddy himself of being part of the scandal. The report alleged that Reddy put his agents in the BBMP war room, who in turn were booking beds for his supporters. Reddy and his agents are alleged to have issued threats to officials in the war room to prioritize his supporters over others, the paper reported.

The report further alleged that the beds were also being sold for monetary exchange to distressed patients.

Despite making false accusations, and despite one of the BJP MLA himself being an accused in the bed allotment scam, there is yet no action initiated against any of them.