A former legislator from India’s ruling party has been caught on boasting on camera about getting at least five Muslims killed in the western Indian state of Rajasthan.
“We have killed five of them so far, be it in Lalwandi, be it Behror … I have given a free hand to the workers, kill those ****** behind cow slaughter,” Gyan Dev Ahuja, a politician belonging to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is seen saying in a video now viral in India.
“We will get you acquitted, we will get you out on bail too,” he said, purportedly referring to the mob lynchings and killings related to alleged cow slaughter in his area.
Indian media reports earlier this week said Ahuja has been charged with promoting religious hatred and enmity, and was interrogated by police in Rajasthan on Monday.
Between 2013 and 2018, Ahuja was a legislator from Ramgarh in Rajasthan’s Alwar district, which saw a series of mob lynchings and killings of Muslims by Hindu mobs.
On Monday, Indian news website The Quint reported that at least three such deaths happened in Alwar in 2017 and 2018 over allegations of slaughtering cows, which Hindus consider holy.
“Pehlu Khan was lynched in public view in April 2017. Umar Khan was shot dead in November 2017, a murder that two (cow vigilantes) owned up to. And Rakbar Khan was killed in July 2018,” said the report.
“They all took place in Rajasthan’s Alwar,” it said.
India’s Muslims have been facing hate speech and attacks since Modi came to power in 2014.
