Lucknow, March 5: A BJP youth wing leader has offered Rs 5 lakh to anyone who chops off the tongue of Kanhaiya Kumar while party MP Yogi Adityanath has compared the JNU student leader with Mohammed Ali Jinnah.
A local BJP politician today said that Kuldeep Varshneya, Badaun district president of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, had been suspended from the organisation after his reward offer yesterday. But Varshneya told The Telegraph he had no such information.
He claimed to be busy at a two-day national convention of the Morcha that BJP national president Amit Shah inaugurated in Vrindavan today.
Varshneya had last evening called a handful of television journalists outside his home in Badaun, 280 km from Lucknow, to make a public offer to any "patriot".
" Aysa dusht Kanhaiya ki jo bhi vyakti jeebh katke layega, usko main nagad paanch lakh rupaye dunga (I shall give Rs 5 lakh in cash to whoever cuts off the tongue of the wicked Kanhaiya)," he announced.
He said he was ready to go to jail for his act, but looked and sounded tense.
When another group of journalists approached Varshneya later in the night for a confirmation, he appeared before the cameras wearing a saffron headgear and accompanied by half-a-dozen supporters.
In a resolute voice, he repeated his offer.
"He (Kanhaiya) cursed our parental organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Bharatiya Janata Party, our father figure and most respected Prime Minister, Narendra Modiji," Varshneya said.
"He incited people to abuse Mother India. So he has insulted our country, our organisation, our Prime Minister. I would give Rs 5 lakh to whoever cuts off his tongue."
He accused Kanhaiya of talking on the JNU campus "about dividing India, destroying the unity of India".
However, the authenticity of a TV channel's video that purportedly shows Kanhaiya joining in "anti-India" sloganeering has been questioned. Kanhaiya insists he never advocated separatism and had demanded azadi (freedom) not from India but in India.
Senior BJP leaders had not commented on Varshneya's move till this afternoon. But Badaun district BJP president Harish Shakya said Varshneya had been "suspended from the Morcha today for six years for anti-organisational activities".
Varshneya told this newspaper over the phone: "I can't talk much, but I'm very much at our national convention in Vrindavan. I don't have information about any decision against me."
Like most of the Sangh's wings including the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal, the Morcha lacks any membership roll and its office-bearers are nominated verbally.
Gorakhpur MP Yogi Adityanath, known as a motormouth, today compared Kanhaiya to the founder of Pakistan.
"We won't let any Jinnah be reborn in any educational institution; we'll bury them before they are born," he said in Gorakhpur. "Unfortunate things are happening at JNU. More unfortunate is that some teachers of the university are supporting anti-national forces."
