A court in Maharashtra on Tuesday remanded Congress MLA Nitesh Rane and 17 of his supporters in judicial custody till July 23, reported PTI. They were arrested last week and sent to police custody for pouring mud on a civic engineer and tying him to a bridge near Kankavli in Sindhudurg district.
Rane and his supporters were produced before the court in Kankavli after their police custody expired. Their bail applications will come up for hearing on Wednesday.
On July 4 when the incident took place, Rane, who is the legislator from Kankavli, was inspecting potholes on the Mumbai-Goa highway. He was reportedly upset because of the deteriorating condition of the road.
In a video of the incident, the legislator was seen pushing the engineer, identified as Prakash Shede, while his supporters poured buckets of mud over the official’s head. A group of Rane’s supporters, allegedly belonging to the Swabhiman Sanghatna, were then seen tying up Shede by the side of the bridge.
“Throw it [mud] on him,” Nitesh Rane was heard saying in the video. “Throw it on his head. Now you will understand...What should people do, should they die in front of you? What will happen if the wall collapses?”
Nitesh Rane’s father Narayan Rane, who is a Rajya Sabha MP and former chief minister, had apologised for his son’s conduct.
The incident happened days after a BJP MLA in Madhya Pradesh assaulted an official with a cricket bat.
In 2017, Nitesh Rane had thrown a dead fish at the additional commissioner for fisheries in Sindhudurg during a meeting called to discuss problems faced by the fishermen in the Konkan region.
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