Bengal Hindutva group helps family of Regar who killed Muslim migrant
AID Singha Bahini chief visited Rajsamand on Dec 2 to give ₹1 lakh cheque to Regar’s wife
KOLKATA: A year after Rajasthan resident Shambhu Lal Regar triggered countrywide outrage by murdering a Bengali Muslim labourer on camera, a far-right Hindu group from Bengal has come to the help of Regar’s family with financial and legal support.
On December 6, 2017, Mohammad Afrazul, a resident of Sayedpur village in Bengal’s Malda district was killed with sharp weapon and his body was set ablaze by Regar in Rajsamand district.
The murder was captured on video allegedly by Regar’s n e p h e w who was a r o u n d 15-year-old at that time. The teenager is lodged in a state-run juvenile home in Udaipur since then and Regar is an undertrial prisoner at Jodhpur jail.
On December 2, Devdutta Maji, president of the Hindu group, Singha Bahini, visited Regar’s family at Rajsamand and gave a cheque for ₹1 lakh to Sita Regar, wife of Shanbhu Lal Regar.
Singha Bahini has also offered to help the teenager. On Friday, Maji wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and chairper- sons of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights and National Commission for Scheduled Castes seeking the boy’s release.
The Regars belong to the Scheduled Caste category.
“I apprehend that this little boy is a victim of dirty politics and/or callousness of a section of the administration,” Maji wrote in his letters.
“We are allowed to see our son but we have no idea what the administration intends to do with him. He appeared for the class 10 board examination but till now the government has not released his result,” Sonia Regar, the boy’s mother, said from Rajmasand over phone on Saturday. “Our son is innocent,” she claimed.
Sonia Regar and her husband Prakash Regar met Maji in Udaipur on January 3 and sought his help. Sita Regar did not want to talk to the media.
“As Hindus, it is our duty to stand by this family. Shambhu Lal Regar is facing trial according to law but why is the teenager locked up for one year?” said Maji.
Singha Bahini was formed last year by eight former leaders of Hindu Samhati, the far-right organization that defended the two teenagers whose social media post triggered communal riots in the North 24 Parganas district in 2017.
These eight people, along with Tapan Ghosh, the Hindu Samhati founder, who often challenged Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), left the organisation in July 2017.
Last year, Singha Bahini became the first and only organisation in the country to raise money through crowd funding for Hindus in Assam when the NRC exercise began.
Interestingly, a lesser known political outfit, Uttar Pradesh Navnirman Sena, has said that it wants to field Shambhulal Regar as its candidate from Agra Lok Sabha seat this year.
After Afrazul was killed, Regar was seen in the video ranting that he did it to ‘stop Love Jihad’, a term publicised to refer to Muslim men marrying Hindu women.
A woman in Rajmasand, who treated Regar as her brother, had fled from home with a Muslim man from Sayedpur in Malda in 2010. In 2012, Shambu Lal visited Sayedpur to bring her back but the woman returned on her own after two weeks.