The far-right influencer, detained on Friday for attacking a student protester’s father at the Cockroach Janta Party protest two months ago, faced action mainly after a video clip went viral. The viral clip was not the whole of it. Swatantra Bhardwaj’s vitriol lasted at least an hour in that podcast.
In it, he bragged that he “cracked the skull” of Sanjay Kumar, whose daughter, Dalit activist Nishu Azad, was among the protesters.
But I don’t know what kind of hatred this is; I have a problem with all of them. Maybe in a past life something terrible happened to me… I have a lot of hatred. The host continued to smile, nodding along.
I have tried so hard to control it within myself because, after all, they are also human.
“If a person wearing a round cap, long beard, and short pyjamas passes by me, I feel like vomiting,” he said in a comment directed at Muslims in the conversation with ‘The Casual Talk’, uploaded on September 1. “I swear by this sacred thread (rakhi on his wrist),” he said, “Even seeing a burqa-clad woman makes me want to vomit. He declared in the conversation that he has “no love for any existing political party”, and wants to form “a completely separate, hardline Hindu party whose sole motive will be a ‘Muslim-free India’. Bhardwaj, who said he’s a student in Delhi, said, “We look for an opportunity where a Muslim makes some mistake so we can ruin them. Identifying himself as a “Maithil Brahmin from Darbhanga, Bihar”, Bhardwaj also argued against caste-based reservation. He said economic status should be the sole basis of quotas. He returned to more violent imagery soon after, and pointedly said that if he were to be booked under the law for alleged atrocities against Dalits (the SC/ST Act), “then whoever applies it, I will shoot them with a bullet”.
After he was detained on Friday for assaulting a Dalit activist’s father, police sources told NDTV that the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act will be invoked in the FIR against him. There are demands, including from the CJP, the Congress and prominent Dalit leaders such as MP Chandrashekhar Azad, that attempt-to-murder charges be added too. So far he’s been booked on assault charges. There is no official link between Bhardwaj and the BJP, as per information available. “Modi ji never posts reels for us. Day and night we talk about his government’s welfare schemes; people call us BJP’s blind followers. Modi ji doesn’t even know us.”
Police have said they will have the victim medically examined before a call on that. He said divine blessings saved him. He also said Delhi BJP minister Kapil Mishra “had our back”. “Chirag Paswan is also our elder brother,” he added, also listing PM Narendra Modi among leaders he called “brothers”. Paswan has since lambasted Bhardwaj and filed a police complaint about the “misuse” of his name. Later in the interview, he said PM Modi was not hardline enough.
