The country is in the midst of hate speeches flying thick and fast. But the hate-mongers are treated with kid-gloves. A few examples from the recent past would suffice to throw light on this incongruity. At a recent Dharam Sansad at Haridwar in Uttarakhand, controversial Hindu leader Yati Narsinghanand exhorted the participants to take up arms. Calls were made for ‘genocide’ against a particular community. It took a month for the police to arrest the swami, but he was out on bail in a few days. Shortly after his release, thumbing his nose against the judiciary and the law-enforcers, he repeated his hate speech at a meeting in Delhi, throwing bail conditions to the wind. 

In a similar incident in Raipur in Chhattisgarh, another swami, Kalicharan from Maharashtra, called the Father of the Nation a ‘traitor’, and praised his assassin Nathuram Godse. The swami is out on bail now. In the wake of the protests against Citizenship Amendment Act, a Union Minister was heard shouting slogans like ‘shoot the traitors’ with an expletive used for ‘traitors’ being a reference to those protesting against the Act. But the long arm of the law did not reach the leader. There are many more who fired similar ‘anti-national’ inuendoes, but escaped the rigors of the law, and continue to be law-makers. In the latest case, a former law-maker in Kerala, P. C. George, went all out spewing venom against Muslims. Though arrested, he was bailed out before the sunset on the same day.

Contrast this with the other side of the story. Kanhaiya Kumar, then students’ union president of JNU, along with others, was arrested in a sedition case on the charge of raising ‘anti-national slogans’ in 2016. It took several weeks for him to come out of the prison cell. Kanhaiya and others claim that they had raised slogans, yes, slogans for freedom from poverty, freedom from fascism, freedom from hunger, and so on. Do these slogans attract sedition charges? The court is yet to pronounce its verdict.

Octogenarian Stan Swamy, who worked for the welfare of tribals in Jharkhand for more than 30 years, was arrested and kept in the confines of jail for six months in Elgar Parishad-Bhima Koregaon case alleging that he had links with Maoists. The saintly Jesuit priest died without getting bail. Reports have emerged that investigating agencies had tampered with his computer, planting fake letters, to fix him in the case. There are many more persons in this category who are languishing in jail.

A couple of weeks back, Jignesh Mevani, an independent MLA in Gujarat, was arrested by Assam police who took him 2500 kms away to present him in a court in a remote district in Assam. His fault: A reported offensive tweet on Nathuram Godse and the Prime Minister. He was arrested and re-arrested, and was in jail for three days, before getting out on bail. Ironically, there are many Godse-worshippers roaming about with impunity, promising to build temples for him. It is inexplicable that hate-mongers are treated leniently while activists and leaders who work for the deliverance of Dalits, Tribals and the down trodden are met with iron hands. The long arm of the law goes soft on provocateurs of violence, but it chokes the voice of those who speak up for the voiceless.