BHOPAL: A Hindu Mahasabha worker Naresh Batham has been booked by police in Gwalior district of Madhya Pradesh for distributing on Thursday, pamphlets sullying Mahatma Gandhi and glorifying the Father of Nation’s assassin Nathuram Godse.
A case was registered against Batham on the complaint of Gwalior-based social activist and ruling Congress worker Ravindra Chauhan. In his complaint that was accompanied with the copy of Hindu Mahasabha, Chauhan alleged that the pamphlet described Mahatma Gandhi as the person who was responsible for country’s partition and justified the January 30, 1948 assassination by Godse.
According to ADG-Gwalior Raja Babu Singh, “the case has been registered at the Lashkar Kotwali against Batham and others u/s 153a of IPC ((promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc and doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony) and efforts underway to arrest them.”
The development came a day after, the Hindu Mahasabha observed the 70th anniversary of the hanging of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassins Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte as ‘Balidan Diwas’ at its office in Daulatganj area of Gwalior on Friday.
Wearing saffron caps, the Hindu outfit members had performed garlanded Godse and Apte’s pictures, performed their puja and arti, besides singing bhajans in their memory at the Mahasabha’s office.
“It’s not the first time that we’ve observed Balidan Diwas to mark the anniversary of execution of Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte, as in the past too we’ve organized the same program,” Hindu Mahasabha national vice-president Jaiveer Bhardwaj had said on Friday.
After the program, the Mahasabha leaders had also submitted to local administration representatives a memorandum addressed to CM Kamal Nath. “The memorandum contains four demands, including the demand to include in the state’s school curriculum Nathuram Godse’s last recorded statements before the trial court, which will educate our young generations about his real nationalistic persona.
Also, we’ve demanded that when Jawaharlal Nehru’s birth anniversary is celebrated as Bal Diwas, then the martyrdom of tenth Sikh Guru Gobind Singh’s two sons (who were tortured and then executed by burying them alive into a wall over their refusal to convert to Islam) be observed as Bal Shahid Diwas,” Bhardwaj had said on Friday.
He had added that “we’ve also demanded that Nathuram Godse’s statue that was seized by local administration-police from our office in 2017 under pressure of then opposition Congress be returned to us. Also, it has been demanded that those who vandalized Swami Vivekanand’s statue at the JNU campus be booked for sedition.”