Raipur: 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 hate speech was made in Raipur, the capital of Chhattisgarh, under the watch of the Bhupesh Baghel-led Congress government. In Chhattisgarh, 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 chairman of the Raipur Municipal Corporation, addressing Balak Das by his name.
A special committee had been set up to organise the event and Dubey, according to Tripathi, was its president. ‘I have killed many people’ The Dharam Sansad, or religious parliament, held on December 25th and 26th at Raipur was organised by Neelkanth Sewa Sansthan and the Doodhadhari Math. A pamphlet summed up its agenda in six points, of which one stated: India should be declared a Hindu nation. “The Hindu Rashtra was on the agenda in the sense that there was to be discussed in the Dharma Sansad how it could be achieved,” Tripathi said. The conclave briefly made national news when Hindu religious leader Kalicharan Maharaj abused Mahatma Gandhi. The Chhattisgarh police promptly registered a case against him incidentally, based on a police complaint filed by Dubey under sections 505(2) and 294 of the India Penal Code.
The most direct incitement to violence came from Ram Balak Das, a 45-year-old Hindu monk affiliated to the Pateshwar Dham in Chhattisgarh’s Balod district. He boasted that he had killed several people in his quest to prevent cow slaughter over the years. Balak Das said he had participated in violence when Chhattisgarh used to be part of Madhya Pradesh before the bifurcation in 2000 and had no cow protection law or “gau seva aayog”.