"Without any enquiry or investigation, I was handed over my termination letter. No one even heard my side of the story. Why am I being harassed?" said Bobby, the sanitation worker in Uttar Pradesh, who was fired over carrying portraits of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath in his garbage cart on Saturday, 16 July.
A video, which showed the portraits of the two leaders in the garbage cart, was circulated widely on social media, following which Mathura-Vrindavan Nagar Nigam terminated the services of the worker.
The video shows him being stopped and accosted by some people asking him about the portraits in the wheel barrow with garbage.
"A probe should look into who abandoned the pictures in the garbage. I am an uneducated man. My only job is to take away the garbage and dispose it," he told The Quint in an interview.
He further requested the prime minister and the chief minister to set up a commission for probing the incident, since he was not at fault for this.
"I've been in this job for close to three decades and I am the only breadwinner of my family," he said.
'Educated People at Fault Too': Mathura Mayor
Although Mathura Mayor Mukesh Arya Bandhu supported the decision to terminate Bobby, he said that the "educated and civilised" people where the pictures were dumped are in the wrong too.
"He (Bobby) is an uneducated sanitation worker and had he been this intelligent, he would not have been doing this sanitation work. The public that the spot where the pictures were dumped is in a posh area where civilised and educated people live," he said.
"How can people make such mistakes that they abandon pictures of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and chief Minister Yogi Adityanath in the garbage? This raises a question mark on them as well," he added.
However, on being asked why Bobby was terminated despite this, he said:
"He made a big mistake. If any person consumes food, he recognises picture of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. He made a mistake by keeping those pictures in the garbage dump. He made a mistake somewhere that is why he was terminated."
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