Delhi: “Wherever you see them, if you want to set their minds right, then there is only one treatment and that is total boycott. Do you all agree? Raise yourp hands if you agree. Now say with me that we will completely boycott them, we will not buy anything from their shops and stalls, we won’t give them any labour. You just do this. This is their treatment.”
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) member of parliament for west Delhi, Parvesh Verma, can be heard making these remarks in viral videos of the ‘Virat Hindu Sabha’, a public protest meeting organized by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and other Hindu groups on 9 October 2022 at the Ramlila Maidan in northeast Delhi.
A poster circulated by VHP’s national spokesperson Vinod Bansal said the meeting was called to protest against the “brutal killing of Hindu youth Manish by Jihadis”.
Manish, a 19 year old boy, was stabbed to death in Delhi’s Sunder Nagri in public view on 1 October 2022. CCTV captured the now-arrested accused—Alam, Faizan and Bilal— stabbing him as the bystanders watched. The police said the accused attacked Manish due to a personal enmity which started last year when Manish was attacked by the accused’s accomplices Mohsin and Shakir.
Even as the Delhi Police ruled out any communal angle in this case, Hindutva leaders and three BJP lawmakers used it as a pretext for giving hate speeches targeting Muslims.
Article 14 revisited more than 20 events organised in seven states of India since August 2021, where Hindu extremists called for killing of Muslims and building a “Hindu nation”, gave a call to “finish Islam”, took an oath to train in weapons and asked Hindu women to produce more children.
An examination of media reports and follow up with police officials suggests people were booked and arrests made in very few cases. This climate impunity allowed for the same hate mongers to gather again and again in different cities to radicalise Hindus against Muslims.
In five of the seven states we examined—Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, and Maharashtra—the BJP was in power. (It recently lost Himachal Pradesh to the Congress Party). In Delhi, the government was of the Aam Aadmi Party, but the Delhi police reports to the ministry of home affairs, presently under the BJP.
In Chhattisgarh, where the government was led by the Indian National Congress, an FIR was filed in December 2021 and an arrest was made.
Nine of the events were addressed or attended by the BJP lawmakers. They were: BJP MP from Bhopal Pragya Singh Thakur, BJP MP from West Delhi Parvesh Verma, BJP MLA from Delhi Ajay Mahawar, BJP MLA from Loni Nand Kishore Gurjar,, BJP leader Satish Upadhyay, BJP MLA from Ambala Aseem Goyal, BJP MLA from Koil Anil Parashar, BJP MLA from Aligarh Mukta Raja, BJP MLA from Sohna Sanjay Singh.
The Supreme Court, while hearing a petition filed by journalist Shaheen Abdullah, against hate speeches on 21 October 2022, came down heavily on police’s inaction in curbing hate speeches and issued a set of directions.
This story was originally published in article-14.com . Read the full story here