New Delhi, March 20 The Aam Aadmi Party's Delhi unit president, Saurabh Bharadwaj, accused the BJP government on Friday of allowing people to die during the recent Palam fire tragedy in order to hide its own failures in responding to the emergency.
Speaking at a press conference, he said that residents had requested officials to move a fire engine so that mattresses could be laid out for those trapped in the building to jump into, but their requests were ignored.
Displaying an 'arthi' (funeral bier) as a form of protest, the AAP leader said he was prepared to die, but would not be intimidated for speaking out.
"The BJP and Delhi Police believe that intimidation will silence the AAP, but that will not happen. I am prepared to die, but the party will never back down," he said.
Meanwhile, Delhi BJP president Virendra Sachdeva alleged that the building stored "large quantities" of flammable materials.
"There is a common discussion in Palam that the building where the fire broke out had large quantities of flammable materials stored on its ground floor. I ask Saurabh Bharadwaj – does he acknowledge or not that flammable substances were stored within the building?" he asked.
He said Bharadwaj's conduct at the press conference showed that he had no genuine grief for those who died in the tragedy.
"The way in which Bharadwaj staged a dramatic spectacle at today's press conference, tying a shroud around his head and bringing along a funeral bier, makes it abundantly clear that he feels no genuine grief over the tragedy that has befallen a family," Sachdeva said.
Nine members of a family – including a 70-year-old woman and three of her granddaughters, one just three years old – were killed after a massive fire tore through a multi-storey residential building in southwest Delhi's Palam area on Wednesday morning.
The building, located in a congested lane near the Palam metro station, housed a cloth-and-cosmetics business in the basement, ground and first floors, while the family lived on the upper levels.
Chief Minister Rekha Gupta has ordered a magisterial probe to investigate the allegation of a delay in responding to the incident.
The probe is focusing on the timing of the call made about the blaze, the response time of fire officials, technical issues related to fire tenders, and the alleged storage of inflammable material in the affected building, official sources said on Friday.