The Delhi PWD minister said the man had abused his family before he lost his temper, while accusing a local AAP MLA of demanding a commission on road work.
Parvesh Verma isn't denying the video. He's just telling you it's missing context.
The Delhi PWD minister, caught on camera during what's being described as a road inspection in Tilak Nagar, has said the clip everyone's sharing skips the part where the man allegedly hurled abuse at his family. "Jo hua wo nahi hona chahiye tha," Verma said, according to the Free Press Journal, which translates roughly to what happened shouldn't have happened. That's about as close to an apology as the statement gets.
But the rest of his version is less about regret and more about counter-attack.
Verma has accused the Aam Aadmi Party of trying to derail government work in the area, and he's named names. Local MLA Jarnail Singh, he claims, had been pushing PWD engineers for weeks to introduce him to the road contractor and arrange a commission. "If someone obstructs government work and an AAP MLA demands commission from our officials, we will not tolerate it," Verma said.
According to the minister, the engineers involved have already gone to the police, and an FIR is in process. He also alleged that once the commission demand went unmet, the freshly laid road was damaged repeatedly at night. None of this is independently confirmed here. It's Verma's account, relayed through a single report, and it hasn't been tested against Jarnail Singh's version or any police record made public so far.
What led up to the slap, per Verma, is oddly specific. He says he went to the site on a Sunday to check on construction and found residents telling him the road hadn't been built in 15 years. He called Singh three times. Waited 45 minutes. Says he deliberately kept his own party workers away from the spot so it wouldn't turn into a crowd situation.
When Singh did show up, Verma alleges, it was with his own supporters already briefed and ready, and that the MLA "immediately began behaving rudely." That's the point at which, in Verma's telling, the man abused his family and the minister slapped him.
Singh's side of this isn't in the reporting available, and that's a hole worth flagging. A viral slap video with two competing narratives and an FIR somewhere in the pipeline is not a closed story, whatever the minister's press conference suggests.
Verma has also announced third-party audits and core-cutting tests on the Tilak Nagar road, an attempt to shift the conversation from the assault clip to the actual quality of the construction. Whether that lands, or whether the slap video simply keeps running on loop through the news cycle, depends a lot on what AAP and Jarnail Singh say next. So far, that response hasn't come.
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