04, Jun 2022 | CJP Team

Bharat Singh Walia, a body builder, calls himself the “modern saadhu” on YouTube, and has over 1.5 lakh followers there. On Instagram he goes by his own name and has over 67,000 followers. On both, he projects himself as a “Brahmin warrior” a caste-indicative term that he explains as meaning “intelligent like a Brahmin and brave like a kshatriya or warriors,” the sacred thread, or janeo on display on his muscled torso.

In many he has his head shaved, and in some he has a beard, styled to make him look like the revered Maratha warrior king Chatrapati Shivaji, he often adds a saffron shawl in many of his photos. However it is not his styling to look like a non-Bollywood version of Akshay Kumar that has put him on the hate watch list. It is his blatant Hindutva style hate speech.

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“Garv se kaho hum hindu hain. Is pavan dhara ke bindu hain,” meaning, “Say proudly that we are Hindus, the centre of this holy land,” etc. are benign when compared to him amplifying learnings from Whatsapp university. He claims Hinduism is fragile and vulnerable and even blames the 2022 exodus of Hindus from Kashmir on ‘others’,

“Don’t mess with someone who has the brains of a Brahmin and the power of a Kshatriya,” warns Bharat Singh Walia. A video shows him swinging an axe around with a threat that he will “fill your days with pain… and you will spend the future in darkness.”

His post, which recently went viral, was a poster of his video set to an Hindutva song the likes of which are being used by right-wing mobs to publicise their hate attacks, hate speech and harassment of women, Dalits, Muslims, Christians and anyone else they consider “inferior” or an “outsider. Here the words are, “Hindu jagaane aya hoon, main Hindu jaga kar jaoonga.. Marte dam tak apne mooh se jai Sriram gaona… chamak rahi talwar, chamal raha trishul hai… Hindu ko kamzor jo samjhe yeh dushman ki bhool hai.” These lines translate as, “I am here to awaken Hindus, we will say Jai Sri Ram till the end, we have swords and tridents, and our enemy is mistaken if he thinks we are weak.”

Walia, who reportedly hails from Chandigarh has now restricted the comments on this Instagram post titled in all caps, “THE CONDITION OF HINDUS IN INDIA”. He plays a song on the poster of a video, also available here:

However, here lies the twist. He uses the entire video to explain how he shed his “secularism” to turn a “hindutva warrior”. Shirtless, head shaved, janeu in view, Walia ‘explains’, nay attacks, fellow YouTuber and body builder Rubal Dhankar, and one Rajveer as ‘framing’ him. Rubal Dhankar works with the Delhi Police and is a well known YouTuber, and according to Walia these men somehow targeted him with accusations of misconduct with a woman.

Walia claims that these men are from different castes and thus attacking him. He also claims that he started wearing the “signs of  Hinduism” like the shikha, or the tuft/lock of hair on the top of a shaved head. He also makes claims that it has become difficult for him to move around in India, and in Kerala specifically. His rants take on the tone of dangerous fake news and he claims “genocides” are happening in Kerala.

He then moves to his core agenda, to incite Hindus and ends saying, “I am against maximum Muslims.” He then invokes the Kashi Vishwanath controversy saying, “I do not leave the decision to the Supreme Court, I leave it to you,” inciting communal hate towards Muslims.

Image Courtesy: YouTube

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