Members of the Youth Congress and the National Students’ Union of India (NSUI) have defended their partymen’s act of staging a protest outside the Aditi Hotel and taking a legal recourse against the owner. The bill issued by the restaurant mocked the UPA for scams and rising prices through a footnote in the end, which irked a few Congress activists who had gone to eat there.
Suraj Singh Thakur of the NSUI said that the party, too, exercised its own right of filing a police complaint. “We felt insulted and humiliated about someone mocking our party this way and went ahead and filed a complaint. If the hotel owner has the right to express himself, so do we. We have been given a right by the Constitution to approach the police in case of any grievance, which is all we did. Moreover, this is no way of expressing your criticism by making such statements in bill footnotes,” he said.
Mumbai Youth Congress chief Ganesh Yadav, too, defended the action saying that they protested in a “democratic” way. “There are political parties that resort to physical harm, intimidation and vandalism and we did not do any of that. We merely held a peaceful protest over something that we found offensive. We did not attack anyone or forced the owner to shut down the hotel. It is our birthright to file a police complaint and the protests ended after the owner apologised,” he said. “We did not trample upon anyone’s freedom of expression as we are being criticised for,” he added.