The road was new. The script was not. And Parvesh Verma didn’t do it once.
On Sunday, Delhi’s Public Works Minister Parvesh Verma arrived in Tilak Nagar to inspect a freshly laid stretch of road. Within minutes, local AAP leader Jarnail Singh was peeling the surface away by hand to show how poorly it had been laid. A young man was filming. Then, in a video now circulating widely, the minister was seen pushing down the man’s phone with one hand and slapping him with the other.
The man, who says he handles the MLA Jarnail Singh’s social media, alleges he was slapped, grabbed by the neck by the minister’s security and threatened by those accompanying Verma. Delhi Police say they have received his complaint at Vikaspuri police station and are verifying the facts.
Verma tells it differently. He says the clip lacks context, that AAP workers abused his family, and that the MLA had been pressing PWD engineers for a commission from the contractor — a claim AAP has denied. But the Delhi minister did not deny the moment itself. “Jo hua wo nahi hona chahiye tha (What happened should not have happened)”, he said, in a video where he refused to apologise.
On that, at least, everything is on record (on camera), and hence possibly the minister isn’t denying what has happened on the streets of capital. The trouble is that a version of it has happened before. Not a slap, but the same sequence: a provocation, an outcry, a defence, and a career that stumbled briefly, but came back on tracks.
A record written in notices
January 2020. Verma, then West Delhi’s MP, told news agency ANI that the Shaheen Bagh protesters would “enter your houses, rape your sisters and daughters, kill them.” A day earlier, at a rally in Vikaspuri, he had promised to clear Shaheen Bagh within an hour of a BJP win and to raze mosques built on government land within a month. The Election Commission dropped him from the BJP’s star campaigner list and barred him from campaigning for 96 hours. Days later came a second, 24-hour ban for calling Arvind Kejriwal an “atankwadi” (terrorist). Verma insisted he had called him a “naxal”, not a terrorist.
October 2022. At a VHP-organised gathering in Dilshad Garden, called after a young man’s killing in which the accused at that point were from a minority community, he told the crowd: “Wherever you find them, there is only one way to straighten them — total boycott.” Verma later said he had named no community. Police did register an FIR, but against the organisers, for holding the event without permission. Not against the speech.
The run-up to the 2025 polls brought a fresh bundle. In December 2024, AAP accused him of handing Rs 1,100 to women voters at his official residence; he said the money came from Rashtriya Swabhiman Sansthan, a trust founded by his father. In January, AAP alleged that fake voters were being added to the rolls in New Delhi, with Arvind Kejriwal claiming that 13,000 applications to add voters had been filed in just 15 days. The Election Commission asked Delhi’s Chief Electoral Officer to inquire into AAP’s complaints. Two days later, AAP MP Sanjay Singh alleged that Verma had applied to register 33 voters at the government bungalow he was occupying as a former MP. Verma, in turn, claimed some 60,000 names had been struck off the constituency’s rolls since 2020, and laid it at AAP’s door. The Returning Officer directed police to register an FIR over videos said to show him distributing shoes to women at a temple campus. The police filed only a non-cognisable report, a lesser entry for offences they cannot investigate without a magistrate’s order. Verma said no shoes were distributed and that he had honoured sanitation workers. And his question about “thousands of vehicles with Punjab registration plates” in Delhi before Republic Day drew charges from Kejriwal and Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann that he had insulted Punjabis. Verma answered with legal notices demanding Rs 100 crore in damages from the two.
Then he defeated Kejriwal by 4,089 votes and walked into the cabinet.
The pattern, not the verdict
None of these episodes has ended in a conviction, and Verma has contested every allegation. That is precisely the point. Each row produced a notice, a complaint or a denial. None produced a lasting cost.
The system registered every controversy. The career absorbed every one.
Tilak Nagar tests whether that still holds. This time there is video, a police complaint and a ministerial admission that a line was crossed. Delhi can investigate both. What it cannot do is act surprised.
Also, a question that a common person has on its mind – what if the minister was slapped by the commoner? Would the police still be “verifying the facts”, or would the FIR already have been written?