UP Police assures 'fair probe' in murder case after 13 Muslim family members convert as protest
Lucknow, Oct 3 : Police officials in Baghpat district of western Uttar Pradesh have assured family members of a young man alleged to have been murdered that a "just probe" would be carried out into the matter, after 13 of them changed their religion to Hinduism as a protest.
Additional Superintendent of Police, Rajesh Kumar Srivastava, visited the village after news emerged that 13 members of a Muslim family had converted, alleging "unfair investigation" by the police.
Srivastava told IANS that he had met the family members to assure them of a "free and fair probe", which he said was still underway. "The decision to change their religion was their own and the police has nothing to do with it," he added.
The family members alleged that the body of the young man, aged 22, was found in a shop on July 22 this year and that he had been murdered, although the police refused to accept this and had closed the case calling it a suicide.
The 13 family members of the deceased had given affidavits to the sub-divisional magistrate (SDM) of Badaut informing the district administration of their "wilful changing of religion", a district official told IANS. They also participated in a special 'havan', changing there names to Hindu ones, the official, who did not want to be named, said.
All 13 are from Niwada village's Khubbipura locality. During the conversion rituals, Hindu Yuva Vahini office- bearers were present. Some family members alleged that they were forced to convert by the Vahini members. The Vahini was founded in April 2002, on Ram Navami day by Yogi Adityanath, the present chief minister of Uttar Pradesh.
Village head Raj Kumar Singh and others said they will petition senior officers to get the family members of the deceased person justice. Singh said that no coercion was involved in the change of religion. The conversions have sparked off some tension in the area.
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Oath-taking ceremony of first BJP govt in Bengal on May 9; Modi, Shah likely to attend
Kolkata (PTI): The oath-taking ceremony of the first BJP government in West Bengal will be held at Brigade Parade Ground here on May 9, marking the saffron camp’s arrival in power in a state after decades on the political fringes.
The ceremony, scheduled to begin at 10 am, is expected to witness the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, BJP president Nitin Nabin, several Union ministers and chief ministers of BJP- and NDA-ruled states, party sources said.
“The new BJP government will take oath on May 9 at 10 am at Brigade Parade Ground,” state BJP president Samik Bhattacharya announced on Wednesday.
Even as the BJP leadership kept its cards close to the chest on the chief ministerial face, Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari has emerged as a frontrunner in internal discussions after cementing his position as the party’s principal mass leader in Bengal politics.
Adhikari, once among Mamata Banerjee’s closest lieutenants and a key architect of the TMC’s rural expansion in districts such as Purba Medinipur, crossed over to the BJP ahead of the 2021 assembly elections and went on to defeat Banerjee in Nandigram in one of Bengal’s fiercest political battles.
Five years later, he again found himself at the centre of Bengal’s political churn by beating Banerjee in her own turf at Bhabanipur by over 15,000 votes.
Other names for the CM post doing the rounds include Bhattacharya, Union minister Sukanta Majumdar and former Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Dasgupta, though party insiders indicated that the leadership was inclined towards projecting a “bhumiputra” face rooted in Bengal’s linguistic and cultural ethos.
During the campaign, Shah repeatedly asserted that the BJP’s chief minister in Bengal would be a “son of the soil”, born and educated in the state, in an attempt to blunt the TMC’s sustained attack that the BJP represented an “outsider” political culture alien to Bengal’s social and intellectual traditions.
The BJP bagged 207 of the 294 assembly seats in the recently concluded elections, ending the Trinamool Congress’s uninterrupted 15-year rule and scripting the saffron party’s biggest breakthrough in a state where it once struggled to open its electoral account.
Significantly, the swearing-in ceremony will be held on the 25th day of Baisakh in the Bengali calendar — observed across the state as Rabindra Jayanti, the birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore — lending the event a deeper cultural symbolism.
According to BJP leaders, the choice of the date is aimed at embedding the party’s historic rise within Bengal’s cultural imagination and countering the long-standing perception battle over identity and belonging.
Over the last decade, the BJP has steadily attempted to appropriate and reinterpret icons of Bengal’s cultural nationalism — from Tagore and Swami Vivekananda to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Syama Prasad Mookerjee — as part of a broader ideological effort to expand its emotional and political footprint in the state.
Party insiders said the leadership was also conscious of the need to balance Bengal’s competing regional aspirations while choosing the chief ministerial face, with discussions also taking place around whether greater representation should be accorded to north Bengal, a region where the BJP has made substantial electoral gains over successive elections.
A meeting of the newly elected BJP MLAs has been convened on May 8 evening, party sources said, though the leadership remained tight-lipped over the final choice.
The Brigade Parade Ground ceremony is expected to mark not merely a transfer of power, but a defining moment in Bengal’s political history, the culmination of the BJP’s long ideological and organisational march from the margins to the centre of power in a state that had for decades resisted the saffron surge seen elsewhere in India.
