Nobody who performed the actual ritual has been charged with anything. Rahul Gandhi has.
That's the detail that's driving Congress up the wall this week, and it's worth sitting with for a second before getting into how we got here. On August 31, Haldwani's Kotwali police station registered FIR number 297/26 against the Leader of Opposition, based on a complaint from a local man, Amit Kumar, who says he took part in the purification ceremony and felt insulted by what Gandhi had been saying about it. The case invokes Sections 196 and 299 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita plus Section 3(1)(q) of the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act which happens to be the exact law Gandhi had spent the previous week demanding be used against the people who performed the ritual in the first place.
Three weeks earlier, none of this existed.
Kharge addressed a rally at Ramlila Ground in Haldwani on August 8. Standard campaign stuff, part of Congress's outreach ahead of state elections due in 2027. Shortly after he left, a group calling itself Shri Ram Sena turned up at the same ground and performed a havan, sprinkling what's been widely reported as Gangajal across the site.
Congress read it as an insult aimed squarely at Kharge's identity as a Dalit leader, and the accusation had legs. Kharge raised it himself in the Rajya Sabha on August 13, calling the BJP "anti-religion" and asking, essentially, why his presence somewhere would require the place to be cleansed afterward. JP Nadda's response, when it came, was to call the episode unfortunate. One word. Nothing more.
For about two weeks, that was roughly where things sat.
Uttarakhand's BJP president was asked about the ritual on the sidelines of a Rakshabandhan event in Mussoorie, and instead of distancing the party from it, he defended it outright. The ground, Bhatt said, had been "defiled and polluted" by slogans raised during Kharge's rally, and the purification had nothing to do with caste. Congress, in his telling, was simply out of real issues and manufacturing this one.
Pawan Khera and Supriya Shrinate didn't wait long to respond. Khera wanted to know whether the BJP would take action against a sitting state chief who'd just defended what Congress was openly calling untouchability. Shrinate went further on social media, saying discrimination "flows through the veins" of the BJP-RSS ecosystem a line the BJP dismissed as theatrics, though it didn't stop Nadda's careful one-word "unfortunate" from looking a little threadbare.
By August 29, Gandhi had folded the whole episode into a much bigger argument. At a Delhi press conference, he called the ritual another name for untouchability, said it amounted to a constitutional crime, and demanded Narendra Modi personally order an FIR against whoever carried it out. He also cast it as part of a wider fight between constitutional values and what he called the BJP-RSS worldview heavy framing for what began as a havan at a rally ground.
Priyanka Gandhi Vadra backed him. Shashi Tharoor called the underlying attitude a deeply entrenched, discriminatory mindset, which is about as Tharoor a sentence as you'll find this week. Outside RSS headquarters in Delhi, Youth Congress workers burned pages of the Manusmriti, a piece of protest theatre pointed enough that it needed no further explanation.
Pushkar Singh Dhami wasn't buying any of it. Congress, the Uttarakhand chief minister told reporters that same day, had become "issue-less." None of the people who performed the ritual were BJP office-bearers, he said, adding that he doubted anyone in the state even knew Kharge's caste. BJP MP Sudhanshu Trivedi made a parallel case at his own press conference in Delhi, accusing Congress of reaching for caste, language, region and gender whenever it needed a wedge issue.
Which brings us back to Sunday. Kumari Selja, Congress's Uttarakhand in-charge, put the imbalance plainly: an FIR against the man who spoke up about discrimination, and nothing against the men who performed the ritual he was objecting to. AIMIM's Asaduddin Owaisi weighed in too, asking how untouchability could still be happening in 2026 at all and calling for arrests though notably not Gandhi's.
Nobody expects this to end quietly. Uttarakhand votes in 2027, both parties have already staked out positions they can't easily walk back, and an FIR against a sitting Leader of Opposition tends to generate its own momentum regardless of what a court eventually decides. For now the case sits with Haldwani police, Gandhi hasn't commented on the FIR itself, and the ground where this all started is presumably just a ground again.
Haldwani police have registered a case against Rahul Gandhi under the SC/ST Act, weeks after a shuddhikaran ceremony was carried out at the same ground where Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge had just addressed a rally. Congress says the ritual was untouchability dressed up as religion. The BJP says caste never entered into it. Somewhere in between, a state BJP chief openly defended the ceremony, Youth Congress workers burned pages of the Manusmriti outside RSS headquarters, and Uttarakhand's 2027 election started looking a lot closer than eighteen months away.
