THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Reiterating that the July 17 attack on him in Jharkhand’s Pakur district had ‘state patronage’, social activist and scholar Swami Agnivesh on Tuesday produced a copy of the letter he had written to Jharkhand Chief Minister Raghubar Das, informing him of his plan to visit the state. Agnivesh produced the copy in response to Das’s claim he had no knowledge of Agnivesh’s arrival.
Delivering the 17th N Narendran Memorial Lecture here on Tuesday, Agnivesh read out letters he had written to Das and Governor Draupadi Murmu on July 2 informing them of his visit and requesting an audience with them. The ADC to the Governor got back to him saying she would not be available on July 16 to meet him, but Agnivesh could call on her on the July 18. But the CMO had not responded.
Agnivesh, 79, was injured after being attacked by a mob when he was exiting a hotel in Pakur. He had gone to Pakur to meet the Paharia tribe. ‘’If the CM was in the dark about my visit to Pakur or even Ranchi and the local administration also was in the dark, how could these people know exactly the place where I was addressing a press conference and the moment and hour when I would be stepping out?’’ he said. Subsequent developments in the case had confirmed his suspicion that the whole incident had state patronage, he said.
In his lecture on ‘Tolerance, Plurality and Respect for Dissent’, he hit out at the RSS saying the organisation has been systematically poisoning young minds with what Hitler termed ‘Cultural Nationalism’. The fight against such forces needs to be political in nature and demands a profound and deep alliance of Adivasis, minorities and other citizens of the country.
The tribal communities in the country were paying the biggest price for development, Agnivesh said. They are being displaced ‘six times over’ on account of various development initiatives.“The Adivasis are being uprooted from their home and hearth. The government has signed MoUs with 201 big corporates for handing over 350,000 acres of mineral-rich land,’’ he said. “Their Constitutional rights are being cold-bloodedly murdered,’’ he said.Condemning the incidents where people were killed in the name of cow slaughter, he said no animal can be more sacred than a human life.