‘Shoot them’: In Congress-ruled Chhattisgarh, hate speech against minority groups goes unchecked

A Hindu monk addresses a gathering of a few hundred people and exhorts them to stop religious conversions and cow slaughter: “Pehle roko, phir toko, aur nahi hua toh…” The crowd responds: “Thoko.” Stop them, chide them, and if it doesn’t work… shoot them.

The monk goes on to repeat the slogan one more time, urging the crowd to respond loudly. The crowd obliges with an even more vigorous chant of “thoko”.

This scene is from video footage recorded at a Dharam Sansad, or religious conclave, held in December – not the one in Haridwar in Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled Uttarakhand.

Instead, the hate speech was made in Raipur, the capital of Chhattisgarh, under the watch of the Bhupesh Baghel-led Congress government.

The Haridwar event, where Hindu monks called for Muslims to be killed, was widely criticised by Congress leaders. “Strictest action should be taken against those who incite hatred and violence of this kind,” the party’s general secretary Priyanka Gandhi had said, referring to the Haridwar hate speeches.

In Chhattisgarh, however, Congress leader Pramod Dubey thanked Ram Balak Das, the Hindu monk who led the chant of “shoot them”, for his “sermon” when he spoke from the stage soon after. “You are our guru,” said Dubey, the…

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