Senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Yashwant Sinha and 54 others were remanded to judicial custody by a local court on Tuesday after they refused to seek bail in a case of alleged assault of a Jharkhand State Electricity Board official.

Judicial Magistrate R B Pal sent them to judicial custody for 14 days after Sinha and others refused to take bail. Sinha and others were arrested on Monday after JSEB’s Hazaribagh branch General Manager Dhanesh Jha filed an FIR, accusing them of tying him up during a demonstration on electricity crisis by the BJP’s district unit.

Sinha had admitted before the media on Tuesday that he had ‘instructed’ the party’s women activists to tie up Jha using a rope. “Yes, I asked them to tie the hands of the GM as women are the worst sufferers for not getting power. Their children’s education is also suffering,” Sinha had told reporters.

The deputy superintendent had rescued Jha from the women. Jha had said that the incident was ‘humiliating and insulting.’