Bure din for Bharat Mata: Ramdev the rakshas wants to cut heads off

Irony may be the current Indian staple, but Baba Ramdev's monstrous cue from Maharashtra CM Devendra Fadnavis on Bharat Mata ki jai, and taking it many steps further by saying were it not for the law of the land, he would have cut off the heads of those refusing to say the slogan, cannot be made light of.

The yoga guru said the following at an RSS peace meet, Sadbhavna Sammelan, in Haryana: "We respect this country's law and Constitution, otherwise if anybody disrespects Bharat Mata, we have the capability of beheading not one but thousands and lakhs."

Debating the nationalist efficacy of the slogan, or buttressing the coercive tactics of the current establishment that's literally enforcing it on its sovereign citizens, is one thing. But Ramdev's speech, ostensibly a direct attack on Darul Uloom Deoband's fatwa against the slogan and a salvo fired at Lok Sabha MP from Hyderabad, Asaduddin Owaisi, is, plain and simple, a direct incitement to violence. This is hate speech, as per law.

That the Patanjali group honcho, selling a consumerist wet dream of a purchasable Hindu Rashtra, who has as much overt backing from the ruling dispensation as possible, can expect to get away after saying words that oddly mirror the style and rhetoric of say an ISIS' Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, is telling.

At a time when fabricated messages on WhatsApp are enough to goad an excitable mob to lynch a man to death, when cattle herders of a particular community are hanged in public to "teach them a lesson", can Ramdev's comments be brushed off as "fringe opinion"?

Booking Ramdev under hate speech is more important than even Kamlesh Tiwari's arrest, whose "derogatory" comment on Prophet Mohammad was basically bipartisan homophobia writ large. Here, Ramdev is not only calling for a massacre of those refusing to say Bharat Mata ki jai, but his "topiwala" remark is singling out Muslims per se.

If this isn't incitement to violence, what is? And if this is how RSS wants to enshrine peace and harmony in India, then we are better off without them.