Alarmed by the unabated violence against leaders of the Hindu community in Tamil Nadu, the State BJP leadership has turned to the Governor for help. A team of BJP leaders submitted a memorandum to Governor C Vidyasagar Rao on Monday with a plea to entrust the National Investigation Agency (NIA) with the responsibility of probing the recent murders of Hindu activists.
“The Tamil Nadu Police, which is full of DMK loyalists is misrepresenting facts and furnishing wrong information to the Government about the murders and attacks on Hindus. Whenever a Hindu leader is murdered, the police portray it as a fallout of business rivalry which is a blatant lie. The Hindus in Tamil Nadu have been besieged by Islamic extremists,” said H Raja, BJP national secretary, who led the delegation to Raj Bhavan on Monday.
According to a senior BJP leader in Tamil Nadu, the party decided to submit a representation to the Governor following continued victimisation of Hindu activists by the police as well as Islamic outfits. “The police have failed to arrest the killers of Sasikumar and Suri, leaders of Hindu Munnani and Viswa Hindu Parishat last month. Instead of arresting the murderers, the police have arrested six youths who staged demonstration in Coimbatore to protest the unabated murders of Hindu activists,” said Raja. The last three years has seen more than two dozen Sangh Parivar leaders falling victims to attacks allegedly unleashed by Islamic extremists.
He pointed out that those who were arrested have been slapped with Goondas Act against all norms. “There are certain terms and conditions for charging a person with Goondas Act. All those laws have been blatantly violated by the police,” said Subramanian Balaji, lawyer, Madras High Court who is also a human rights activist.
Saturday saw an 18-year-old S Sivasankaran, a BJP activist in Thiruvarur district committing suicide as the police had arrested him and kept him under custody for three days wrongly implicating him in an assault case. “When Sivasankaran came out on bail on Thursday he had complained to his parents that the police had thrashed him up while interrogating him in connection with the assault on a pastor. He had sustained serious injuries due to the torture by police,” said Pettai Siva BJP’s Thiruvarur district chief.
Tamil Nadu’s leading crime chronicler told The Pioneer that dozens of Sangh Paribvar activists have lost their lives in the recent past. “But they have not retaliated even once other than staging protest marches. It is known to all that all these murders have been committed by Islamic extremists. The only murder case against the Hindu activists is that of the 1997 murder of Palani Baba, founder president of the Jihad Committee. Since then there are no charges of murder or assault against the Sangh Parivar activists,” said the historian who does not want his name to be quoted for obvious reasons.
But Abdul Rehman, official spokesman of Tamil Nadu Thowheed Jamat said no Islamic outfits were involved in the murders of Hindu activists. “These are all fall outs of business rivalries because most of these Hindu activists are engaged in financial deals. It is easy for them to blame the Islamic outfits for these murders,” said Rehman.
Raja has a list of 129 Hindu activists, who he says, were murdered by Islamic extremists. “Though the police know well who the murderers are they divert the investigation so that the culprits could escape from the law,” said Raja. Sleuths of the National Investigation Agency on Monday picked up from Tirunelveli district an IS activist Subu Hani, a native of Kerala. He has been taken to an undisclosed location for questioning. The arrest of Hani is in continuation of the NIA
taking into custody six IS operatives from Kannur and Kozhikode in Kerala on Sunday.