Mumbai kisi ke baap ka nahin hai: Top cop

After his 'disagreement' with the Bachchan family, MNS chief Raj Thackeray found a new target in Mumbai’s Jt Commissioner of Police K L Prasad.

After Amitabh Bachchan’s apology on behalf of his wife Jaya, Maharashtra Navanirman Sena (MNS) president Raj Thackeray today withdrew his agitation against the Bachchan family and found a new target: Mumbai’s Joint Commissioner of Police K L Prasad.

Prasad said on Wednesday that “Mumbai kisi ke baap ka nahin hai” (Mumbai is not the property of anyone’s father) and Thackeray today challenged him to remove the uniform and come to the streets. “If he has the ego of his badge, uniform, and position, he should leave it aside and come down to the streets. Then he will know whose father Mumbai belongs to,” Thackeray said.

This is not the first time that the outspoken Joint Commissioner of Police in charge of Law and Order has incurred MNS’s wrath. The 1982-batch IPS officer from Nellore in Andhra Pradesh took a tough stand against MNS activists when they targeted migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. “We will call the Army into the city if necessary, but we will ensure that the law is not broken,” he had said. On another occasion, while fielding questions from the media, he had said: “Raj Thackeray is nobody big. Even Union ministers have been arrested in the past.”

Last month, Prasad called Thackeray and told him that the MNS would be allowed to protest peacefully in connection with the Marathi signboards controversy and told him not to break the law . As the August 28 deadline for putting up Marathi signboards neared, police made over 1,000 preventive arrests of MNS workers.

Before taking over as JCP Law and Order in June 2007, Prasad was at the State Intelligence Department after a stint with the CBI.

Today, he was unavailable for comments after Raj challenged him to “remove his police uniform and come onto the street,” triggering speculation that the government had asked him not to add more fuel to the fire.