Kiran Bedi Kiran Bedi

Delhi chief ministerial candidate Kiran Bedi and state unit president Satish Upadhyay are among five BJP functionaries booked for describing people from the Northeast as immigrants in the party's vision document, said a report.

The case was registered under section 153A of the IPC on the complaint of a Guwahati businessman. BJP functionaries Harsh Vardhan, Praveen Shankar Kapoor and Prabhat Jha were also named in the FIR.

"The word immigrant cannot be a spelling mistake. The document was surely printed after being proofed. This is a racial offence," the TOI report quoted complainant Arun Pathak as saying.

The complainant alleged that the offensive word has been intentionally used in the document to "promote racial disharmony and ill-will between the northeast and the rest of the country''.

Pathak said that the corrected version of the document issued by the party later is also biased.

"The BJP's Delhi unit issued a clarification and termed us 'people from the northeast in Delhi'. This is equally offensive as the northeast does not only belong to people of northeastern origin. By using the phrase, the accused have further alienated the people of the region on the basis of their racial and geographical origin,'' Pathak was quoted as saying.

Following the goof-up, the BJP apologized for the mistake, saying that it was a simple typographical error. In Assam, some groups staged demonstration in protest.

Activists of Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) and All Assam Minority Students' Union staged protests in Assam.

