Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge held a big rally at Ramlila Maidan in Haldwani on 8 August. Two days later, some local people from a group called Shri Ram Sena Dharmarth Seva Nyas went there, cleaned up the place (they say there was litter and liquor bottles), and did a havan — that usual purification ritual. They called it shuddhikaran.
Congress people immediately said this was done because Kharge is Dalit. They called it pure untouchability. The issue even reached Parliament. Then on 29 August, Rahul Gandhi held a press conference in Delhi and went full throttle. He said what happened in Haldwani was not purification, it was untouchability. He called it a crime under the Constitution, said BJP-RSS people still practise this stuff, and demanded that the Prime Minister himself order an FIR under the SC/ST Act against the people who did the havan. He even played a video of the Uttarakhand BJP president talking about the ground being “polluted with slogans.”
A day later, the whole thing flipped.
On the night of 30 August, Haldwani police registered an FIR against Rahul Gandhi himself. The complainant is a 26-year-old guy named Amit Kumar from the Valmiki community. He was part of that cleaning and havan. He says he and other Scheduled Caste people took part in it, that it had nothing to do with anyone’s caste, and that Rahul Gandhi, without checking anything, called the whole thing untouchability and anti-Dalit. Kumar says those words hurt the community’s feelings and painted the people who did the ritual as casteist.
Police have booked Rahul under sections for promoting enmity between groups, outraging religious feelings, and also under the SC/ST Act. Investigation has started.
The people who organised the havan are sticking to their story. They say the ground was dirty after the rally, they cleaned it, and then did the ritual like they would for any place used for Ramlila and other religious events. Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Dhami has said the people who did the havan were not BJP workers and that giving it a caste colour is unnecessary. A Dalit Union minister from the state also told Rahul not to malign Uttarakhand like this.
So now we have this strange situation. Rahul demanded an FIR against the people who performed the havan. Instead, an FIR has been filed against him for the way he described it.
This is the kind of political fight that doesn’t really end. One side sees the havan as a deliberate insult to a Dalit leader. The other side sees a normal cleaning-plus-ritual after a big public meeting, and now an attempt to turn it into a caste issue for politics. Both sides are talking about the Constitution, both are talking about justice, and both are accusing the other of playing with people’s feelings.
For ordinary people watching this, it’s just another reminder of how quickly everything becomes about caste and ideology. A ground gets cleaned, a havan is done, speeches are made in Delhi, and suddenly FIRs start flying. The investigation will take its course, statements will keep coming, and the political noise will continue.
But at the end of the day, this is what happened: Rahul Gandhi called the Haldwani ritual untouchability, and now there’s an FIR against him for those remarks.
Sources:
Reports from The Hindu, The Indian Express, Hindustan Times, India Today, ANI, The Statesman and Times of India (29–31 August 2026).
@Rohit Manral