New Delhi: The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and the Shiv Sena hit out Monday at the Centre over alleged targeting of Bollywood on the drug abuse issue. They also flagged the misuse of authority by officials in dealing with the menace. The issue was hotly debated during a discussion in Lok Sabha on a bill that sought to rectify an anomaly in the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the amendments proposed only seek to correct certain ‘clerical error’.
NCP’s Supriya Sule said it was disappointing that farmers’ demands were not debated upon, but a clerical change was being discussed at length. She said the drug abuse menace needs to be dealt with comprehensively and alleged that the government was adopting ‘knee-jerk’ solutions. “This is an issue of drugs not NDA vs UPA,” Sule said, calling for comprehensive and bipartisan approach in dealing with the issue.
“My question to this government is (why) Bollywood is really put into a corner as they are some evil people who only do drugs,” Sule said. She added that it was disappointing that the whole fraternity was being targeted.
“It (Bollywood) is an industry, it gets crores of jobs to people. It has (given) international visibility to India. India’s Bollywood stars have given identity to Indians all over the world. It is not just glamour, there is a lot of hard work, dedication and commitment. This is the same government which uses a lot of Bollywood stars to push in social messages, so how does Bollywood become bad then,” the NCP leader said.
Taking a dig at the government, she said it is a ‘wonderful bill’ in which retrospective penal provision is there, but it does not deal with officers who ‘misuse and abuse’ their positions.
Sule’s remarks come days after Maharashtra Minister Nawab Malik accused the NCB and its officer Sameer Wankhede of framing people.
Sule said there are cases in which those who have not been found with drugs, they have been kept in jail for 30 days. “Is this the kind of power we will give to one officer, who will just misuse it, abuse it and blackmail people? They will ask for crores of rupees from people. This is not justice,” she said.
Shiv Sena’s Arvind Sawant also hit out at the BJP over the issue of drug abuse and alleged that it tried to play politics on it during the Bihar Assembly polls by using the Sushant Singh Rajput case.
“When the new (Maharashtra) government was formed, some incidents took place…The Sushant Singh case was quoted. After his death, the whole narrative was drawn that the entire Maharashtra is full of drug addicts and the NCB went on acting on that, he said.
Sawant said the film industry was vociferously attacked and rhetorically asked the chair, “Do you know how dirty politics of it really was.”
Swant said that more mistakes were being made with the amendment to the act. Opposing the retrospective penal provision in the bill, he said it was ‘totally illegal’.