A BJP Lok Sabha member pulled down the ghunghats (veils) of several women and held their hands before giving them subsidy certificates on Tuesday under a housing scheme for the poor, the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana-Gramin.

Kaisarganj MP Brijbhushan Saran Singh, chief guest at the event at the Colonelganj block office in Gonda, 90km east of Lucknow, also told the women to turn their faces towards the cameras.

Some 270 people, mostly women, received the certificates from the MP, who faces more than half-a-dozen cases of attempt to murder, robbery and rioting.

When a woman drew her ghunghat back over her face after Singh had removed it, he pulled it away a second time.

Gonda district magistrate Prabhanshu Srivastava was heard asking the women not to be shy.

Singh later told reporters that Raja Ram Mohan Roy, too, had opposed the tradition of women wearing veils.

Roy, a social and religious reformer and one of the founders of the Brahmo Samaj, had campaigned against several Hindu practices such as Sati (widow-burning), child marriage, polygamy, caste system, untouchability and female infanticide.

Rajat Kanta Ray, former professor emeritus of history at Presidency University and former vice-chancellor of Visva-Bharati University, said there was no evidence that Roy had campaigned against the system of women wearing veils.

The Yojana is a credit-linked subsidy scheme that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had launched in 2015, combining all the existing affordable housing schemes.

Under the scheme, the government facilitates housing loans with an interest subsidy for families that lack houses of their own and satisfy an income cut-off.

The houses have a minimum floor area of 25sqm (270sqft). A beneficiary receives a maximum subsidy of Rs 2.67 lakh on a Rs 20-lakh loan.

“Modi and Yogi (Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath) have prepared schemes keeping in mind the poor of the country,” Singh said.

“Those who demand bribes for giving a house under the scheme must be punished.”

There have been reports of government officials demanding bribes to include people’s names in the list of beneficiaries.

Singh had last week criticised the “delay” in a court decision on the Ayodhya dispute, saying people were getting restless.

“A similar delay happened in 1992,” he had said, alluding to a mob demolishing the Babri Masjid on December 6 that year.