Shiladitya Dev

Shiladitya Dev, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader who was previously the Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) from the Hojai has been a serial hate offender and has been involved in making statements which are hate ridden and made with a motive to fuel the communal tensions between communities. His hate speech had led to an FIR at the Silchar police station in 2018 for allegedly making provocative statements to divide Assamese and Bengalis. A case also was filed in the same year in the court of chief judicial magistrate, Nagaon, against the BJP MLA for his frequent communal remarks on the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in the state. Dev had alleged that Hindu refugees were being shown as foreigners, while the names of Bangladeshi Muslims were published in the final NRC.
In Aug 2020, multiple FIRs had been filed against him by several groups and individuals for particularly inciteful speeches. At the time when he had been widely condemned by Assamese society he had dared dubbed Assamese litterateur who happened to be a Muslim, an “intellectual jihadi.” A month after this incident, his communally motivated posts on Facebook were taken down after an investigation was conducted by the TIME Magazine.
In June 2022, Shiladitya Dev was a participant in a news channel debate, happening on NKTV, an Assamese language news channel, where he made a series of anti-minority comments during one such live debate on its channel. During this debate, Dev spoke in Assamese about the alleged influx of Bangladeshis into Assam. The gist of his speech was, “80 lakh Bangladeshi origin Muslims have illegally entered India,” and that “During partition Muslims had created a separate country for themselves. They should be grateful they are being allowed to live in India.”
Once again, on October 24, 2022, Dev unleashed words that were inciteful, provoking the wider community in the name of ‘Miya Museum’, a day after the museum was inaugurated. He started his diatribe with, "Assam is filled with Miyas, so why there is need of Miya Museum, it should set on fire and set ablaze." This was a brazen incitement to targeted violence. Shiladitya Dev has been making open calls of violence against the Bengali Muslims and targeting their community.

Ragini Tiwari

Ragini Tiwari alias Janki Behen is a self-proclaimed Hindutva leader from Bihar, previously accused of provoking peoplein connection with the farmers protest and the Delhi violence. During the February 2020 communal violence in Delhi, she broadcast a Facebook Live video saying that Hindus won’t tolerate more attacks against them and instigated them to come out and “Die or kill.” Even during the farmer’s protest, in a Facebook Live video, not only did she openly accept that she incited violence in Jaffrabad during the Delhi 2020 violence, but also threatened to recreate it. An FIR was lodged against her but she immediately went missing when the police were about to arrest her. However, two months ago, she resurfaced as she lead the “Naukri Jihad Band Karo” protests outside Pawan Hans Office premises in connection with the controversy that surfaced online over ‘only Muslim’ recruitment at Mini-Ratna Pawan Hans helicopter service.

Bajrang Muni Das

Bajrang Muni Das is a priest or ‘mahant’ of Maharshi Shri Lakshman Das Udasin Ashram in Khairabad town of Uttar Pradesh. In April 2022, he issued a criminal threat to rape Muslim women while he was addressing supporters who took out a procession on the occasion of Navratri and Hindu New Year, outside a mosque. Das was arrested by the police on April 13, 2022 from Sitapur, 100 km from state capital Lucknow, six days after the incident and was granted bail within 10 days. Das has been widely sharing hate instigating videos online and has been seen openly threatening violence against Muslims, often in the presence of the police.

Pooja Pandey

Dr. Pooja Shakun Pandey alias Annapurna Bharti of Niranjani Akhada is a prominent leader of the Hindu Mahasabha and is often in the headlines for hate speech against Muslims. She assured herself a name in Hindutva’s Hall of Hate-Fame in February 2019 when she re-created the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in Aligarh. She was briefly arrested then and released soon after.

Pandey was also one of the infamous hate-mongers at Haridwar in December 2021. In February, 2022 Pandey spoke at Prayagraj and claimed that those speeches were in the interest of the safety of religious leaders. She also defended repeat offenders Narsinganand and Jitendra Narayan Singh Tyagi who were under arrest at the time. She was also in the news for comments on Prime Minister Narendra Modi after he announced his government’s decision to repeal the three farm laws in the wake of a year-long protest by the farmers in Delhi and other parts of India.

She was also briefly arrested in April 2020 for making provocative comments against members of the Tablighi Jamaat. In March 2021, she had demanded a ban on Muslims from entering temples soon after a minor Muslim boy was beaten up by Hindutva activist Shringi Yadav for entering a temple in Dasna. She is regularly seen interacting with BJP party leaders like BJP MP Sadhvi Pragya and the Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan. On June 7, 2022, a case was registered against her for likening Friday prayers (Jumma) to ‘Terrorism’.

Pravin Togadia

Pravin Togadia, surgeon-turned-Hindutva leader is a president of Antarashtriya Hindu Parishad (AHP) who seems to be on his way to revive his 2000's agenda of militarising Hindu society. In April 2022, he was sighted along with his team making innocent people of Assam, repeat an anti-Muslim oath after him while holding sharp trishuls and then openly distributing these weapons amongst the crowd. Similarly, AHP had held a ‘Trishul Diksha’ in Gujarat where they distributed thousands of swords and tridents to the people. He has been in the news for frequenting the state of Assam with the intention to spew hate against Muslim migrants who came to India after 1951.

Praveen Togadia, first became notorious as one of the architects of the 2002 communal genocide in Gujarat, and has been spewing venom and vitriol against minorities ever since. Peace loving individuals, democratic minded citizens and the country’s religious minorities and Dalits have been in his crosshairs since the early 2000s. He had been taken into custody in April 2003 in Rajasthan for breaking the ban on Trishul distribution that the government of Rajasthan had invoked. Later the same year, Togadia was involved in the vicious attack on secular forces working for justice for victims of the Gujarat carnage and the families of those who perished in the Sabarmati Express at Godhra. He singled out CJP Secretary Teesta Setalvad as a prime target of his hate speech and had declared that she should be prevented from entering Gujarat.

Shrinkhal Chaliha

Serial Hate Offender Shrinkhal Chaliha is a leader of the popular nationalist-supremacist- organisation Veer Lachit Sena in Assam. Chaliha is known for his repeated hate speech against the local populations, especially religious, linguistic and ethnic minorities through repeated use of the ‘bogey’ of ‘illegal Bangladeshi migrants’. His verbal threats that threaten targeted violence have not been prosecuted. He threatens targeted violence. His words provoke people to hurt and kill Bengali speaking persons what he openly calls a ‘Jihad against Bengali speaking people’. In October last year, he had demanded that an eviction drive be carried out in Mayang in Morigaon district of Assam (with a substantial Muslim population), accusing the local population of being “encroachers”. Chaliha had also reportedly asked a non-Assamese shop keeper in Shivsagar to shut down his shop in September 2021. Chaliha had been caught on camera threatening to use hengdang (a traditional Ahom double-edged sword) on the man renting a shop owned by an indigenous widow woman for not paying the rent. Since the woman did not get fruitful result from the court, the man was illegally forced by Shrinkhal Chaliha to vacate the room. In late January 2022, as many as 12 members of Chaliha’s Veer Lachit Sena were arrested – seven on charges of extortion and threatening a businessman in Golaghat, and five for assaulting a Bengali youth in Morigoan. Recently, in the case of a custodial death of a fisherman in Assam, calling the deceased fisherman’s family and friends “Jihadi”, he demanded that the family of the deceased not be paid any compensation and should be “encountered” instead. By demanding a “reaction” from the authorities, what Chaliha is actually demanding is violent actions in the garb of ‘retaliation’. This makes the villagers of the area belonging to the Muslim and Bengali speaking minorities acutely vulnerable.