The Faizabad police yesterday arrested Mahesh Mishra, convenor of the outfit’s Faizabad and Ayodhya units on charges of hurting religious sentiments of Muslims and spreading communal hatred.
On May 24, Sabrang India had published a detailed report on the sangh parivar’s sinister drive to raise the communal temperature in UP through arms training of Hindus in the build-up to the 2017 Assembly polls.
On May 14, the Bajrang Dal had organised a “self-defense camp” at Ayodhya. A video of the camp went viral leading to public outrage and the lodging of an FIR under section 153-A of IPC (promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion and doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony).
Giving details of the case to the Indian Express, the station house officer, Ayodhya police station, Rajeev Singh said: “As per the FIR, some volunteers in the training camp were depicted as Muslim terrorists while others were presented as Hindu youths of Bharti Sena. The investigating officer would approach media houses to obtain the video. We would start the process of identifying people at the event once we receive the video.”
The VHP, whose militant offspring the Bajrang Dal is, has sought to explain away the arms training camp as a "mock drill" which is an "annual affair". What the VHP will have difficulty explain the meaning of skull-caps and false beards at the mock drill.
Bajrang Dal, the fire-breathing youth wing of the VHP had planned similar weapons training camps at other places in UP – Sultanpur, Gorakhpur, Pilibhit, Noida and Fatehpur in the coming days.
As detailed in the May 24 report published by Sabrang India, weapons and arms training of Hindu youth constitutes part of the sangh parivar’s ongoing agenda of creating vigilante groups virulently hostile to the country’s religious minorities.