BHOPAL, 30 July — A regional leader from Sonia Gandhi’s main opposition Congress party yesterday shot and wounded a political colleague in the central state of Madhya Pradesh over minor spat, officials said.
The police said Inder Prajapat, a general secretary in Madhya Pradesh’s chapter of the Congress, whipped out a pistol and fired at his colleague Manak Agarwal after accusing him of publishing a derogatory newspaper report about his second marriage. Prajapat suspected Manak to be behind the newspaper report about his second marriage to a dancer from Ujjain.
One of the two bullets grazed the chin of Agarwal, who is also a party general secretary, and the second slammed into his chest, critically wounding the 49-year-old politician, police said from the state capital of Bhopal. Madhya Pradesh is governed by the Congress, which is India’s main opposition party.
After the shooting, the 42-year-old Prajapat walked to a Bhopal police station and calmly surrendered himself, city police chief Police Vivek Sharma said, adding that Agarwal underwent a successful surgery. Manak is stated to be out of danger after one of the two bullets which got embedded in his left shoulder was removed by doctors in the local Hamidia Hospital.
“In fact, the news of Agarwal having survived may have come as a shock to Prajapat who told us that he had killed Agarwal,” Sharma said, adding the surrendered politician has been charged with attempted homicide.
The embarrassed state party chief Radhakishan Malviya immediately removed Prajapat from the powerful post of general secretary and also scrapped his primary membership in the Congress, party officials in New Delhi added.
