Yogi Adityanath sacks UP Minority Commission member Kunwar Afzal Chaudhary

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath sacked the state minority commission member Kunwar Afzal Chaudhary on Thursday. Chaudhary, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader from Ghaziabad in western Uttar Pradesh, has been removed from the UP Minority Commission with immediate effect.

He had been appointed to the commission on February 5, 2018 along with eight others including former MLC from Kanpur Tanveer Haider Usmani as the chairperson.

Apart from Chaudhary and Usmani, the Adityanath government had appointed Suresh Jain Rituraj of Meerut, Muzaffarnagar's Sukhdarshan Bedi, Badaun's Manoj Kumar Masih, Kunwar Sayed Iqbal Haider, Fatehpur's Mohammad Aslam, Sofia Ahmed of Kanpur and Rumana Siddiqui of Lucknow.

However, Mohammad Aslam did not join the commission.

The most interesting appointment was that of 24-year-old Sofia Ahmed, a victim of triple talaq. Hailing from Chennai, Sofia had married the brother of a Samajwadi Party leader in Kanpur. But her husband reported uttered triple talaq and divorced her in the middle of a night after consuming liquor and threw her out of the house along with their 40-day-old baby

She later filed a petition in the Supreme Court along with other triple talaq victims, challenging the practice. She joined the BJP in Kanpur in December 2016.