Indian freestyle wrestler Divya Kakran who won a Bronze medal in the Commonwealth Games 2022 slammed the Dehli government for not supporting her during her initial years of training.
"I come from extreme poverty. I had no money to travel. I would sit next to train toilets, in general bogie to travel for competitions. The Delhi government never helped us," Kakran told ANI, adding that she had given 58 medals to Delhi by 2017.
Kakran said that she started fighting in Uttar Pradesh in 2018. "In 2019, the Uttar Pradesh government gave me the Rani Laxmi Bai award. In 2020, they gave me a life-long pension. Yesterday, they announced Rs 50 lakh and a gazetted officer rank post. The UP government helped me, even the Haryana government did. But Delhi never came to help," she said.
The wrestler's revelations kicked up a political storm with the BJP on Thursday accusing the Aam Aadmi Party government in Delhi of insulting "women and sportspersons".
BJP spokesperson Shehzad Poonawalla said the AAP social media team trolled Kakran and its leader Saurabh Bharadwaj "insultingly" asked her to show a certificate after she complained about not being given any financial benefits from the government led by Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.
Poonawalla said at a press conference that Kakran then produced a certificate regarding her representing Delhi and alleged that the AAP has a history of insulting those who raise the honour of the national flag whether soldiers or sportspersons.
He asked Kejriwal to sack Bharadwaj from all positions in the party.
The BJP spokesperson also took an aim at Kejriwal for his counter-offensive on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's repeated criticism of "revdi culture" (freebies), saying no one was named by Modi but the AAP leader sprang to defend it due to his sense of guilt.
While the Modi government has engaged in welfarism by empowering different deprived sections of society with targeted schemes, political parties engaged in offering "revdi" to everyone ahead of elections without caring if such schemes can be implemented or not, he said.
(With PTI inputs)