The 88-year-old father of Bhupesh Baghel, the Chief Minister of Chhattisgarh and the Congress party’s Other Backward Castes mascot in the Hindi belt, was dismissed as a crank by political experts we spoke to, when we discovered that the father was sent to jail by his son’s government in September 2021.
Nand Kumar Baghel was remanded in judicial custody for 15 days for offending religious sentiments after he made statements against the dominance of Brahmins and Vedic Hinduism in Chhattisgarh. The CM, not only used the incident to claim that he was an impartial administrator but also milked every moment of the attention it generated to burnish his pro-Hindu credentials.
