India News | NCP, Shiv Sena Slam Centre over Targeting of Bollywood on Drug Abuse Issue

New Delhi, Dec 13 (PTI) The NCP and the Shiv Sena on Monday hit out at the Centre over alleged targeting of Bollywood on the drug abuse issue and 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".

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Participating in the debate, Nationalist Congress Party'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.

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"This is an issue of drugs not NDA vs UPA," Sule said, calling for comprehensive and bipartisan approach in dealing with the issue.

Hitting out at what she called was targeting of Maharashtra, the NCP MP said if there is so much data on drug abuse pan-India, why is only Maharashtra being "cornered".

"My question to this government is (why) Bollywood is really put into a corner as they are some evil people who only do drugs," she said, adding 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 hardwork, 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.

"There are young girls (who are) being called, once, twice, thrice, to offices of NCB (Narcotics Control Bureau). Why are these young actresses and actors being called (for questioning). What happened to all those cases. You see it in the media for three days and then the story is gone," Sule 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.

There is a case of one of her party colleagues whose son-in-law was put in jail for nine months but later it was found that the substance in question was not ganja but tobacco, Sule said in an apparent reference to the case of son-in-law of NCP leader Nawab Malik.

"What is going on in NCB. Is there no accountability.... We will not tolerate injustice against anybody by any officer misusing his position. That exactly what the essence of this bill should be," Sule said.

"You cannot plant drugs, arrest people, take selfies with them, put them on social media and selectively leak information (to the media)," she said.

Her remarks come days after 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.

She said the Bollywood fraternity should not be targeted in this manner and cited the contributions of actors who became MPs such as Hema Malini and Kirron Kher.

"We have Hema Ji , Kirron Ji and we have Mr (Sunny) Doel who I haven't seen in a while.... (I am) Proud they (Malini and Kher) joined politics. So unfair to call Bollywood names," 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."

He 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".

He hit out at the government over the targeting of Bollywood over the drug abuse issue, adding that politics should not be played on the matter.

He said, "24X7 all channels were showing it, because it was (the case of) the son of an actor, at the same time Rs 21,000 crore worth heroin were caught in Mundra port that was coming via Afghanistan."

He also called for defining cannabis and other drugs clearly and made a remarks on 'sadhus', which was objected to by a member, and he subsequently took back his words.

BJP leader Rattan Lal Kataria said the government was doing everything it could to deal with drug addiction and end it in the country.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)