Surendra Kumar Tiwary’s brother does not approve of the slogan that has landed the BJP worker behind bars.
Surendra, 56, a cloth trader who lives in the New Market area, was allegedly shouting “desh ke gaddaron ko, goli maaro… (shoot the traitors)” while marching to the venue of Union home minister Amit Shah’s rally on Sunday. He was arrested with two others — Pankaj Prasad and Dhruba Bose.
Police said Surendra was a member of the state executive committee of the BJP Basti Unnayan Cell.
At his home, off Marquis Street, Surendra’s sister-in-law said the family would always ask him to stay away from politics but he would spend much of the afternoon and the entire evening working for the BJP.
The family was “shocked and stunned” when the police knocked on their door at 2.30am and asked for him.
“Yeh naara toh bahut kharab hai. ‘Goli maaro’ yeh kaisi baat hain? (It is an objectionable slogan. ‘Shoot them’ what kind of statement is this?”) Narendra Tiwary, Surendra’s younger brother, said on Monday evening.
In the same breath he denied that his elder sibling had raised the slogan on Sunday. “He was at the back of the rally. He did not shout the slogan,” Narendra said.
An officer at Lalbazar said they had video footage that showed Surendra shouting the slogan.
The accused, family members said, seldom talked politics at home.
Surendra used to leave for his shop early in the morning. He would return home by afternoon, eat lunch and leave for party work, his sister-in-law said. “He used to visit a BJP office in Bhowanipore. From afternoon till late in the evening, he would be busy with party work. We had asked him many times to stay away from politics but he would not listen to us,” she said.
Surendra cut short a visit to his ancestral village in Rae Bareli in Uttar Pradesh, where he had gone to mourn a family member’s death, to attend Shah’s rally.
Surendra’s wife is still in Rae Bareli.
Narendra said Surendra was not involved in any political activity in their neighbourhood, which is home to many Muslim and Christian families, too.
What was his exact involvement with the BJP? Family members said Surendra would attend the party’s big rallies but never gave any speech or wrote graffiti anywhere near home. All that the family knew was that he would visit a BJP office somewhere in Bhowanipore.
The family lives in an apartment on the ground floor of a two-storey building. “We were taken aback when the police arrived at our doorstep early on Monday. They asked for my uncle. When he stepped out, they asked him to accompany them to the police station,” Surendra’s nephew, a BCom student, recounted.