On a sweltering afternoon in March, 35-year-old Naveen Choudhary received a video on WhatsApp. In the video, a man interrogates a teenage b...
On a sweltering afternoon in March, 35-year-old Naveen Choudhary received a video on WhatsApp. In the video, a man interrogates a teenage boy, asking him to spell out his name, his father’s name, and explain why he had entered a temple. The boy, who responds with a Muslim name, says he had gone to the temple to drink water. The man then goes on to brutally assault him.
The incident, captured on video, had taken place on March 11 outside the Dasna Devi Temple in Ghaziabad district, Uttar Pradesh, 37 km from Delhi.
First uploaded on Instagram by a handle called Hindu Ekta Sangh, the video had spread over social media. By the time Choudhary watched it, there was a raging controversy over the incident. An MLA of the Bahujan Samaj Party Aslam Chaudhary said it was unfair to bar Muslims from entering the temple, and described its head priest Yati Narsinghanand Saraswati as a “goon”.
This triggered a mobilisation in support of Saraswati. Among those who rushed to the temple to stand in solidarity with the priest was Choudhary, an active worker of the Bharatiya Janata Party in Ghaziabad since 2011. Choudhary did not go alone: he gathered at least a hundred other men who use the...
