Gyan Dev Ahuja, former MLA of the BJP from Ramgarh segment in Alwar, Rajasthan
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 at the time. 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 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 as to say the killers are “patriots” and “true descendants of Chhatrapati Shivaji and Guru Gobind Singh”.
“अब तक 5 हमने मारे हैं…कार्यकर्ताओं को खुली छूट दे रखी है..मारो **** को..ज़मानत हम करवाएँगे” ये शब्द राजस्थान भाजपा कार्यकारिणी के सदस्य और पूर्व विधायक ज्ञानदेव आहूजा के हैं।
BJP के मजहबी आतंक व कट्टरता का और क्या सबूत चाहिए? पूरे देश में भाजपा का असली चेहरा सामने आ गया है। pic.twitter.com/v8XhxZEKcF
— Govind Singh Dotasra (@GovindDotasra) August 20, 2022
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 new agency PTI.
But Mr Ahuja, who was legislator from Ramgarh, defended his stance, saying “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.”
He made the comments while interrupting a speaker, who was urging a group of people to launch an agitation against the killing of 45-year-old Chiranjilal Saini 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, though police have not found a communal angle.
He told PTI that in the video he was sitting with a local RSS leader who suggested launching an agitation to protest against “lynching” of Chiranjilal Saini. “Meo people smuggle and slaughter cows, and Hindus have sentiments for cows, so they target the smugglers,” he told the news agency. He said it was his duty to protect his workers.
Rajasthan Congress chief Govind Singh Dotasra, who shared the video on Twitter today, said, “What more proof is needed of the BJP’s religious terror and bigotry? The real face of the BJP has been exposed.”
Pehlu Khan, 55, was lynched in Behror in April 2017, 28-year-old Rakbar Khan in Lalawandi villge in July 2018. Both were from Haryana and belonged to the Meo Muslim community that’s mostly engaged in the dairy trade.
In 2019, the men seen dragging Pehlu Khan by the neck, throwing him to the ground and kicking him repeatedly, were acquitted by a court in Rajasthan on “benefit of doubt”. The case is in the high court since, as the Congress-led state government filed an appeal later that year.
Trial for Rakbar Khan’s murder is on at the local court, where his family has expressed fears of bias.
