“We’ve Killed 5 So Far…”: BJP Ex-MLA In Viral Video Calls For Lynching

By Harsha Kumari Singh /  NDTV

Jaipur: 

Rajasthan BJP leader Gyan Dev Ahuja has been caught on camera urging a crowd to “kill anyone involved in cow slaughter”, saying, “We have so far killed five people, be it in Lalawandi or Behror,” in a direct reference to the lynching of Rakbar Khan and Pehlu Khan.

Both of those murders — one in 2017, the other in 2018 — took place in Ramgarh, the area from where Gyan Dev Ahuja was the MLA when BJP was in power in the state. It wasn’t immediately clear which other three murders he was referring to.

“I have given free hand to workers to kill. We will get them acquitted and secure bail,” he says in the video, apparently from earlier this week. All six accused in Pehlu Khan’s murder were acquitted in 2019 but an appeal by the state’s Congress government is now pending in the high court. In Rakbar Khan’s murder, the trial is still on in the local court.

After the video went viral on Saturday, the BJP leader was booked on charges for spreading communal disharmony, under Section 153A of the Indian Penal Code. He has made similar comments earlier, going as far as to say the killers are “patriots” and “true descendants of Chhatrapati Shivaji and Guru Gobind Singh”.

The BJP’s Alwar unit today said those are “his own views”. “The party does not have this thinking,” BJP’s Alwar South chief Sanjay Singh Naruka told news agency PTI.

But Mr Ahuja defended his stance: “Anyone involved in cow smuggling and slaughter won’t be spared.” He did tweak his statement a bit: “I said five Meo Muslims who were smuggling cows were beaten up by our workers.”

In the video, he made the comments adding to an appeal by another speaker — he described him as a leader of the RSS — for an agitation against the murder of 45-year-old Chiranjilal Saini, who was killed by a mob in Govindgarh town last Sunday upon suspicion of tractor theft. BJP leaders and right-wing groups have said it was a lynching over religion, though police have not found a communal angle.

This story was originally published in ndtv.com . Read the full story here