JOIN USA senior Uttar Pradesh bureaucrat's crude comparison while denying cold deaths at Muzaffarnagar riot relief camps to the people surviving in Siberia has drawn alround flak and condemnation.
UP principal secretary, home, A K Gupta had on Thursday retorted on questions of death of children from cold at relief camps that none died of cold. “No one dies of cold...if it had been so, people will not survive in Siberia'', Gupta said.
Gupta's remarks had come while commenting on the report of a high level committee that said that as many as 34 children had died in the relief camps. He had claimed that the reasons behind their death were other than cold. The official said that some of the children had died of pneumonia.
He had also claimed that a majority of the children who had died had been taken out of the camps by their families for treatment or they had been referred to government hospitals. He attributed some deaths to dysentery.
The official had given a clean chit to the administration and said that there was no ‘medical negligence’.
Gupta's remarks have drawn widespread condemnation and Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav also advised officials to be careful while answering questions from the media. Akhilesh said that the officials should think before speaking.
BJP leader Vijay Bahadur Pathak also slammed the remark and demanded action against the insensitive official.
There were differences among the officials over deaths in the camps owing to cold. The government had earlier also denied that any one died from cold in the camps. Later the district officials had admitted 16 deaths. The panel, however, said that 34 people including children died from cold in the camps.
Thousands of people have still been living in the relief camps spread across Muzaffarnagar and Shamil in tents under the open sky in biting cold. As many as 62 people were killed and over hundred injured in the communal violence that had rocked the district last month.