When Rahul Gandhi spoke of "fighting the Indian State" in Delhi last week, Mukesh Chaudhary was so shocked in his faraway Bihar village that a pail of milk slipped from his hand.
But the 42-year-old tea seller and cattle rearer from Sonupur village in Samastipur is not one to sit crying over spilled milk. He has filed a case against the Congress leader.
The case is not about the loss of ₹250 he suffered from the wasted milk, nor the mental agony that Rahul’s words personally caused him.
The charges he has brought are serious stuff, ranging from a danger to the country’s sovereignty and integrity to organised crime and the outraging of religious beliefs.
"The (magistrate’s) court has taken cognisance of the case and will hear it on February 17. I’m not going to let Rahul get away with this," Mukesh told The Telegraph on Tuesday.
"I’m not a politician but I am a firm believer in my nation. It is above everything for me and nobody can insult, belittle or threaten it."
Rahul had on January 15 said: "The BJP and the RSS have captured every single institution of our country. We are now fighting the BJP, the RSS and the Indian State itself."
Mukesh seems to have interpreted the Rae Bareli MP’s words much as the BJP did, the ruling party holding them up as evidence of the Congress’s "links with Urban Naxals and the Deep State who want to defame, demean and discredit India".
Mukesh, who runs a small tea-and-snacks shop in his village and owns a few cows, said he was leaving home with a bucket containing five litres of milk when he saw Rahul’s "fighting the Indian state" remark on his mobile.
"I became nervous and the pail slipped from my hand, spilling the milk on the ground and causing me a loss of ₹250. I also felt insecure and agonised. It was an attack on my belief that my nation is my religion," Mukesh told this newspaper.
His fear and pain deepened when he read the news in a Hindi newspaper the following morning.
"Rahul Gandhi spoke about fighting the Indian State despite his own party being called the Indian National Congress. Normally, the courts and people in top positions take note of such statements, but nobody did. I thought enough was enough and decided to file a case against him," Mukesh said.
He asked his acquaintances about how to proceed on such matters, met a lawyer named Kishna Kant Chaudhary, and filed a case with the court of the additional chief judicial magistrate at Rosera on January 18.
Rahul has been charged under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita’s sections 152 (acts endangering unity, sovereignty and integrity of India), 299 (deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious beliefs), 197 (imputations, assertions prejudicial to national integration), 352 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace) and 111 (organised crime).
Mukesh, who has studied up to Class X, spent several years in Calcutta, Hyderabad and Dhanbad doing various jobs. He suffered an accident a few years ago that left him with a limp and forced him to return to his village.