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Updated: May 02, 2017 15:37 IST

The Madhya Pradesh unit of the BJP has suspended one of its leaders from Gwalior - Raj Chaddha from the party on Sunday and issued a show cause notice for a Facebook rant on corruption.

State BJP chief Nandkumar Singh Chauhan issued the suspension order after Chaddha’s recent post on Facebook which dragged chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan into the row.

“Mr Chief Minister, Corruption is at its peak in the state. Condition of hospitals is intolerable. Please improve this or sack lakhs of party workers like us who sacrificed everything to fulfill the dream of Pt Deendayal Upadhyay,” Chaddha had written.

Infuriated by the post, the BJP hit back with a suspension and a show cause notice. But Chaddha seems unfazed and unrelenting in his posture and attack.

“O God! Save my party. It is beholding in high esteem those who are working against it and showing its door to those who sacrifice for it”, Chaddha wrote on his Facebook page on Monday following the show cause notice.

He didn’t stop there and escalated his attack saying, “They say party is superior to an individual and the country is superior to party but they consider themselves the party and the country.”

“If you shut the door of hospitals for the poor and pay homage to Pt Deendayal Upadhyay under a tent worth crores of rupees it is just an insult to him (Pt Deendayal Upadhyay),” he wrote.

BJP spokesperson in Madhya Pradesh Rajneesh Agrawal told HT that none of the party workers and leaders was above the party. Hence, the party’s action against the leader was justified.

But the Facebook comments of Chaddha, a former district BJP president in Gwalior and also president of Gwalior Vyapam Mela Authority stirred a hornet’s nest for the direct attack on the chief minister and invited huge response on his FB page to support his charges.

About 300 people liked the post, 32 shared it and more than 100 posted their comments. Only a few of them disapproved Chaddha’s comments. Certain comments hit the CM hard and some did not spare his wife either.

“When Gangotri itself is polluted then who will stop the corruption,” commented one Vishnubhagwan Sharma.

Other responses were equally scathing. ‘BJP leaders have converted power into their shops. As big a leader as big his shop’, ‘Madhya Pradesh has been converted into a laboratory of corruption’, ‘In Shivraj’s regime BJP’s ‘chal, charitra aur chehra’ is exposed’ were some of the responses.

The BJP’s desperation to contain damage caused by Chadda’s comments comes barely a fortnight ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s likely visit to Amarkantak to declare conclusion of Narmada Seva Yatra started by chief minister Chouhan more than three months ago. The CM has been in the Opposition’s firing line for the massive Vyapam scam which is being probed by the CBI.