In current weeks, New Delhi and different Indian cities have witnessed huge anti-government demonstrations and flash protests demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, over allegations of manipulating voter rolls to profit the ruling Bharatiya Janata Get together (BJP).
To stop college students and youth from gathering, the BJP authorities has used intimidation and power. Along with arresting protesters, it has closely barricaded roads, shut down metro stations, and deployed tens of hundreds of police and paramilitary personnel, together with the Delhi Police, Central Reserve Police Drive (CRPF), Border Safety Drive, Indo-Tibetan Border Police, and Sashastra Seema Bal.
A number of of those forces are usually deployed alongside India’s borders or in insurgency-wracked areas. For instance, the CRPF firms deployed within the Delhi protests had been shifted from former Maoist strongholds in Chhattisgarh and components of militancy-hit Jammu and Kashmir. In Delhi, these paramilitary forces are getting used in opposition to unarmed youth activists of the Cockroach Janta Get together (CJP), the All India College students’ Affiliation, and different leftist organizations.
What makes the federal government’s crackdown significantly reprehensible is that un-uniformed males are being allowed to assault the protesters. These usually are not remoted incidents; a number of younger ladies and men have come ahead with horrifying accounts of the violence they confronted by the hands of those thugs.
Importantly, these males are unleashing violence in full view of the police. They’ve the blessings of the ruling dispensation.
Pictures and movies circulating on social media present males sporting saffron scarves — saffron is the colour of the Sangh Parivar, a household of Hindutva-espousing organizations, of which the BJP is a component — shouting slogans in help of the Narendra Modi authorities, chasing younger women and men, dragging them and beating them up mercilessly with sticks. They’re brazen about their violence, describing their victims as “anti-national parts” who “need to be thrashed.”
“Delhi Police tum lath bajao, hum tumhare saath hain” (Delhi Police, you wield the baton, we’re with you), they chant, egging on the police to beat the protesters.
The police and paramilitary personnel in whose presence the vigilantes acted took no motion to power them off the streets. None of them was packed into police vans the way in which unarmed college students had been dragged and pushed into buses.
A video filmed in the course of the crackdown on October 10 in central Delhi confirmed goons beating up younger women and men, even minors. When a lady intervened on a male sufferer’s behalf, the goons could be seen falling upon her, pushing her to the bottom, and pulling at her garments. All this was finished within the presence of at the very least one policeman. The footage confirmed a policeman finally intervening, however he did so to not cease the assault or restrain the assailant and detain him, however to steer him away slightly gently.
The video triggered anger and outrage in India, forcing the police to finally detain 4 males — Raman Saini, Vivekanand alias Vivek, Kapil Kumar, and Ravinder Singh alias Govind Hindu — of the Hindu Raksha Dal (HRD) or Hindu Safety Group.
Admitting that the 4 had been members of his group, HRD chief Bhupendra Singh Tomar aka Pinky Bhaiyya described them as “warriors” who had been “working for Sanatan Dharma” (actually, common reality i.e., Hinduism). In an interview with Outlook journal, Tomar justified the violence they unleashed on the October 10 protests. The CJP activists “tried to vitiate the ambiance within the nation” in the course of the protests at Jantar Mantar in July. “We are going to cope with these people who find themselves resorting to violence, and we are going to set them straight. We take pleasure in our actions, and we are going to proceed to take action,” Tomar mentioned.
Based in 2013, the Hindu Raksha Dal is amongst dozens of vigilante teams which have mushroomed beneath Modi’s rule. They’ve thrived beneath the Sangh Parivar’s patronage. Their activists can’t be dismissed as mere road gangs. They’re the Sangh Parivar’s foot troopers and unleash violence to additional its Hindutva agenda. Outfits just like the HRD and the Bharatiya Gau Raksha Dal (Indian Cow Safety Group) freely have interaction in violence as they take pleasure in state safety.
HRD activists are not often convicted or punished. Saini, Vivek, Kumar, and Singh had been caught on video and had been arrested beneath public stress, however they had been freed on bail quickly after. Delhi Police didn’t increase objections to their launch by the courts. On their launch, Tomar was there to welcome and garland the 4 males.
Tomar himself has over 30 circumstances in opposition to him for hate speech, distributing weapons, issuing demise threats, damaging property, assault, extortion, and elevating inflammatory slogans. The listing of complaints and circumstances in opposition to him is lengthy. He has been arrested in a couple of circumstances solely to be let off on bail quickly after. His supporters have an apt slogan to explain this: “Aaj jail, kal bail, aur phir wahi khel” (jail right this moment, bail tomorrow after which once more, the identical recreation).
The HRD has carried out dozens of assaults on Muslims, secular Indians, and the BJP’s critics. In 2020, Tomar claimed credit score for the assault on college students on the Jawaharlal Nehru College (JNU) in New Delhi. “JNU is a hotbed of anti-national actions and we can not tolerate this,” he mentioned, taking “full duty” for the violence that left at the very least 30 individuals, together with lecturers and college students, injured.
In August 2024, HRD activists burnt down homes and property of Muslims in a slum in Ghaziabad, claiming that they had been Bangladeshis dwelling illegally in India. In December 2025, Tomar and his son had been arrested for distributing swords in Ghaziabad for the “self-defense” of Hindus.
Outfits just like the HRD allow the Sangh Parivar and the BJP authorities to not solely freely unleash illegitimate violence but additionally deny their hyperlinks to the perpetrators of such violence. The membership of Sangh Parivar outfits and their fellow vacationers is nebulous. Consequently, it’s laborious to pin such violence on the Modi authorities.