A Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) minister in the Jharkhand government is defending himself against claims by a woman that he had married her and fathered her son but has been refusing to both acknowledge it and support the three-year-old child.
Agriculture minister Satyanand Jha Batul, a first-time legislator from the BJP, became an embarrassment for the Arjun Munda-led coalition government after a middle-aged woman named Soni Devi from Jamtara claimed that he had been avoiding her and her child and thus causing them great pain. He said the woman’s claims were “baseless and false” and that they could be part of a “political conspiracy against me to blackmail me”.