THE recent sting operation by India Today adds to the growing body of damning evidence against the terrorist outfit Sanatan Sanstha, already implicated in several bomb blasts and assassinations of journalists, academics and activists.
The Sanatan Sanstha is not a ‘fringe’ group. It shares with India’s ruling party BJP and the BJP’s parent organisation RSS the goal of replacing secular democratic India with a fascist ‘Hindu Nation’. In July 2013, Narendra Modi - then the Gujarat CM and Prime Ministerial candidate of the BJP - had on his official letterhead sent a message to a Convention organised by the Sanatan Sanstha, in which he had described the Sanstha and other similar outfits as ‘patriotic.’ At the Convention, many leaders had made inflammatory speeches against the Constitutional rights of minorities and women.
From the assassination of Gandhi to the series of recent assassinations and bomb blasts, saffron terrorists have a long record and yet are evading investigation and punishment. The head of the BJP IT Cell himself has openly expressed admiration for Godse, Gandhiji’s assassin. Clearly, the BJP and the Sanatan Sanstha share the same ideology and goals.
It is clear that the RSS, while on the one hand nurturing a political party like the BJP which is currently in power at the Centre and in many states, also uses state power to protect and patronise many shadowy terrorist outfits which are committed to destroying India’s Constitution and its democracy. The Modi regime, for instance, has worked systematically to ensure that those accused in a series of acts of saffron terror have been acquitted, even as a Public Prosecutor in such cases revealed that the Government was pressurising investigative agencies to weaken these cases.
What is needed is an urgent investigation - both independent and wide-ranging - to expose the entire gamut of the saffron terror network, its funding and its political patrons. It is unlikely that such an investigation will be allowed under the Modi regime. To save India from such saffron terror, the Modi Government must go.
