Lakhimpur Kheri Violence.

Farmers had assembled in the Lakhimpur Kheri district to protest against the visit of Ajay Mishra and Deputy chief minister Keshav Prasad Maurya. Farmers had been infuriated by (Minister of State in the Ministry of Home Affairs )Ajay Mishra‘s earlier statement in which he said that the farmers protest just involved “10-15” people and that it would take “just two minutes to make them fall in line”.

The farmers had been staging a demonstration on the road when a motorcade associated with the minister ran over them killing four farmers and injuring others. Farmer unions say that Ashish Mishra the son of Ajay Mishra ran his car over the protestors but the Mishras denied the allegations and said that Ashish Mishra was not in the car at the time of the incident. Ajay Mishra alleged that farmers started stone pelting which resulted in the driver losing control and ramming into the protestors. However, a video was surfaced which went viral and clearly shows that the farmers were peacefully walking with flags in their hands when the vehicle was plowed into the group of protesting farmers

This viral video makes us ridicule Ajay Mishra’s delusional theory of stone-pelting and the car “instantly losing control” unless we choose to be deceived by it. Perhaps this irrational and impractical thinking despite the video as a piece of evidence reminds us of the fact that ‘you can be the sweetest, the juiciest, and the ripest peach yet people would argue that they hate peaches’. Two workers of the ruling BJP government and the driver were subsequently beaten to death by the angered mob. A fourth person, journalist Raman Kashyap also died amidst the violence. While giving an interview, Raman Kashyap‘s brother claimed that some media personnel were intentionally twisting his words in an attempt to portray that the journalist was was beaten to death by the farmers, however, the post-mortem report had not yet been released.

Raman‘s brother pointed out that reporters had been ignorantly trying to prove the same, the father of the deceased claimed that the marks on the dead body provided evidence for death by being run over by a vehicle. This is another example of how Indian media is maligning the farmers and is concealing the truth from the public eye. Most of the Indian media houses are completely biased and are solely working in accordance with the interests of the Narendra Modi led-BJP government. Despite the immense financial power and political clout of Indian media it is indifferent, lacks quality and diversity, and is generally declining quality, reliability, authenticity, and rationality. Police agreed to investigate the minister and his son only after farmer groups refused to cremate their dead.

As the uneasy calm prevailed in the area, the arrests that followed were not of the murder accused but of the opposition leaders who were willing to commiserate with and support the bereaved families. Samajwadi party politician, Akhilesh Yadav was detained and put under house arrest in Lucknow and Priyanka Gandhi was arrested under section 151, arrest to prevent the commission of cognizable offenses. This violence in Lakhimpur marked a dramatic escalation in the (then) 10-month-old protest against agricultural reforms introduced by the ruling BJP government, passed without any substantive discussion in the Parliament last year. The incident sparked national outrage leading the Supreme Court to take notice of the loss of lives in Lakhimpur.

The Supreme Court expressed its discontent with the UP police probe of sending notices to a murder accused, SC also pointed out that CBI is not a solution to these problems because of the “ persons involved” for “reasons known to you”, subtly indicating that CBI is not an independent agency, it’s a ‘caged parrot’ and is subject to the control of the government, especially considering the portfolio that is held by Ajay Mishra, father of the main accused. Demands were raised for Ajay Mishra‘s resignation, however, not him but BJP allegedly made its leader Varun Gandhi resign, dropping him from the National Executive Committee, allegedly for the simple reason that he had shown some sympathy towards the martyred farmers.

Overall this incident indicated the assault of the very foundations of democracy, indicated that the Modi government is prepared to go to any extent to diminish its critics and adversaries and so are the media personnel as well as the people who center their irrational belief in the government to troll, hurl abuses and set an impudent mark upon anyone who criticizes the government’s actions and vocalizes his/her opinion that very much matters, this reminds me of a dialogue from Shakespeare’s play, The tempest “but with colors fairer painted there foul ends”.

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