Biggest lynching in Independent India happened in Rajiv Gandhi’s era: BJP

New Delhi : Union Minister of Jal Shakti, Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, said on Tuesday that Congress has no right to raise the issue of mob lynching, as the biggest incident of lynching in the history of Independent India happened during Rajiv Gandhi’s era.

Shekhawat’s response came hours after Congress leader Rahul Gandhi tweeted, “Before 2014, the word ‘lynching’ was practically unheard of. #ThankYouModiJi.”

Speaking to the media after senior Punjab Congress leader Rana Gurmit Singh Sodhi joined the BJP at the party headquarters here, Shekhawat said: “I feel that Congress has no right to raise questions over lynching. The biggest such incident in the history of Independent India under any government occured during the era of Rajiv Gandhi, the father of current Congress leader Rahul Gandhi.”

BJP national spokesperson R.P. Singh said, “Rahul Gandhi forgets that his father Rajiv Gandhi supported mob lynching of more than 3,000 Sikhs by Congress MPs and workers.”

Referring to Rajiv Gandhi’s comment, ‘Jab bhi bada ped girta hai, dharti hilti hai’ (whenever a big tree falls, the earth shakes), another BJP leader, Manjinder Singh Sirsa, said, “It is true that Rahul Gandhi didn’t hear about lynching before 2014, because they equated the killings of thousands of innocent Sikhs with fall of a big tree.”

“Rahul Gandhi heard the word lynching for the first time when Congress leader Sajjan Kumar was sent behind bars for the anti-Sikh riots, after Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014,” Sirsa said.

Quoting Rahul Gandhi’s tweet, BJP IT Cell in-charge Amit Malviya said, “Meet Rajiv Gandhi, father of mob lynching, justifying blood curdling genocide of Sikhs. Congress took to the streets, raised slogans like ‘khoon ka badla khoon se lenge’, raped women, wrapped burning tyres around necks of Sikh men while dogs gorged on charred bodies dumped in drains.”

“Ahemdabad (1969), Jalgaon (1970), Moradabad (1980), Nellie (1983), Bhiwandi (1984), Delhi (1984), Ahmedabad (1985), Bhagalpur (1989), Hyderabad (1990), Kanpur (1992), Mumbai (1993). This is just a small list in which more than 100 people died under Nehru-Gandhi parivar’s watch,” Malviya said.