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On 4 May, the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) Karnataka Member of Parliament, Tejasvi Surya, walked into a Bengaluru South COVID-19 war room waving a sheaf of papers. He then read out 16 presumably Muslim names, asking Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) officials, ‘Why were they recruited?'
Surya later called a press conference ‘exposing’ a bed allocation scam in BBMP, accusing officials of allotting beds to those who paid high rates. Shortly after, the contractual employees were removed from BBMP rolls without cause. The MP, who faced a severe backlash for targeting the officials on communal lines, has now been claiming that the list of names “was given to him”, presumably from the BBMP.