A Samajwadi Party leader’s alleged insult of Ram, Sita and Kaushalya has led to his arrest and immediate suspension from his party, feeding the Hindutva narrative a year ahead of the Uttar Pradesh elections.
Senior BJP leaders said the "anti-Hindu" comments by Yadunandan Lal Verma, who used to be a Samajwadi state secretary, would be played up in the Bengal Assembly election campaign, too, to target Trinamool since it enjoys Samajwadi support.
BJP workers had held large-scale protests across Uttar Pradesh on Friday against Verma, whose controversial comments came at a Samrat Ashok Jayanti event in Harpalpur, Hardoi, sometime last week.
Verma allegedly claimed that the Valmiki Ramayan mentioned several "demeaning facts about Ram, Sita and Kaushalya". A video circulating on social media since Friday appears to show Verma using abusive words against the three Ramayan figures.
Unwilling to anger any community a year before the Assembly elections, Samajwadi president Akhilesh Yadav quickly suspended Verma from the membership of the party. "Keeping in view the large-scale protests across the state against Verma’s remarks, the (Hardoi) police filed a case on Friday and arrested him late at night," Harpalpur circle officer Sateyndra Singh said. "He was presented before a magistrate on Saturday and sent to 14 days' judicial custody."
Verma has been charged with outraging the religious feelings of a class, promoting hatred between different groups, and transmitting obscene material electronically.
In New Delhi, BJP parliamentarian Giriraj Singh sought to play up Verma’s remarks with an eye on the Bengal elections.
"Be it the SP or the Congress or the Trinamool Congress, they keep insulting the Hindu religion to woo a particular section," he said.
A senior BJP leader in Lucknow said: "We are definitely going to tell the people of Bengal about the SP leader’s remark because Akhilesh Yadav is supporting the Trinamool Congress there."
Verma had unsuccessfully contested the 2008 Assembly by-election from Sawayajpur in Hardoi as a BJP candidate. In 2017, he contested the Assembly elections from the same seat as a Jan Adhikar Party candidate and lost again. He was in the Bahujan Samaj Party for a while before joining the Samajwadis two years ago. Sharafat Ali, the Samajwadi district president of Hardoi, said Verma’s suspension from the party had "made it clear that we are not in the business of insulting any religion".
"Verma has been like this for a long time. He was previously with the BJP but didn’t make such remarks at the time. We believe that he joined us to tarnish our image."