By IANS,
Panaji : Congress Rajya Sabha MP Shantaram Naik joined the growing list of politicians dodging “missiles” from the audience, after a food packet narrowly missed him during an election rally in a south Goa town late Saturday evening.
Naik, who hails from South Goa, was addressing an election rally in the mining town of Curchorem, 60 kms from Panaji, when a Congress party worker, identified as Rama Desai, who was incidentally seated in the reporters’ box, flung a food packet containing biryani, distributed to the workers, at him.
As he flung the packet which narrowly missed Naik, Desai shouted: “Tumhi sogle fatting (all of you are liars).”
Desai was immediately whisked by the police after the incident, before being booked under section 151 of the Indian Penal Code.
Speaking to IANS, Naik, Goa’s only Rajya Sabha MP, said that he had asked the police only to enquire into the matter and not file a formal complaint against Desai.
“The man had invited me for a public function, which I could not attend due to other obligations,” Naik said, when asked if he knew his “assailant”.
In the recent past, senior Indian politicians like Home Minister P. Chidambaram and Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) prime ministerial candidate L.K. Advani have been the target of things thrown by members of their audience. While a journalist flung his shoe at the home minister during a press conference, a wooden sandal was thrown at Advani by a BJP worker during a public rally last week.