First, he instructs a worker to uproot the idol with a crowbar, then he takes a hammer to it five times. “He is no god, he died in 1918,” t...
First, he instructs a worker to uproot the idol with a crowbar, then he takes a hammer to it five times. “He is no god, he died in 1918,” the middle-aged man declares, looking into the camera. “He was Muslim.”
“Mullah hai,” says another voice in the background, using a pejorative term for Muslims.
A series of videos showing the demolition of an idol of Sai Baba, a spiritual leader revered by Hindus, surfaced on social media last week. In the videos recorded inside a temple, a middle-aged man dressed in a pale-blue shirt could be seen overseeing the demolition.
In another video, the same man, in a white shirt and saffron stole, is seen seated next to Yati Narsinghanand Saraswati, a rabble-rousing Hindu priest from Ghaziabad in western Uttar Pradesh. Saraswati congratulates and blesses him for “breaking and throwing away” the idol of “pakhandi Sai” – fraudster Sai. “If I had my way, jihadis like Sai won’t be able to enter temples,” he says.
Scroll.in traced the idol demolition to a temple in Shahpur Jat in South Delhi. While a member of the temple committee claimed the idol had been removed on March 25 because it was “khandit” or broken, many residents of...
