On the very day the Supreme Court has come down strongly on the Government of India and State Governments for allowing a veritable mob lynching epidemic in India, a mob of BJP Yuva Morcha thugs attacked the 80-year-old anti-communal and human rights campaigner Swami Agnivesh in Pakur in Jharkhand. This incident underscores how the fascist brigades of the ruling party have lost any respect or fear of the rule of law, of courts or the police, and are launching murderous attacks on minorities, activists and dissenting voices. The felicitation of the lynching convicts by Modi's Cabinet Minister Jayant Sinha in Jharkhand was also a recent reminder of how mob rule is the defining feature of Modi Raj in India and in Jharkhand too and other BJP-ruled states.
Meanwhile the Modi Government is proposing to prepare a cadre of 10 lakh youth in the name of having a “disciplined” and nationalist “force of youth”. Such a proposal, seen in the light of mob violence by Sangh-BJP "youth" organisations like BJP Yuva Morcha, Hindu Yuva Vahini, Bajrang Dal and the various Gau Raksha Dals, sounds ominously like the notorious fascist militias of Hitler and Mussolini.
The CPI(ML) demands arrest and prompt prosecution and punishment for those who attacked Swami Agnivesh. We demand that the Prime Minister Modi take responsibility for the spate of lynchings in the country and apologise to the people of India for mob rule, especially for the mob violence perpetrated by cadres of his own party BJP and organisation RSS.
- Dipankar Bhattacharya
General Secretary, CPI(ML) Liberation
