'Shoot the traitors': BJP's Anurag Thakur leads crowd in chant against anti-CAA protesters at BJP rally in New Delhi

A clip of Union minister Anurag Thakur purportedly leading a crowd in a chant of ‘shoot the traitors’ at a BJP rally has surfaced on social media. The video, reportedly taken at a rally in the National Capital, purportedly shows Thakur, the Minister of State for Finance, exhorting the crowd to chant ‘shoot the traitors’, a slogan that has frequently been used to denigrate anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protesters and which was also reportedly heard during the 5 January attack on teachers and students at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) campus in New Delhi.

A poll officer, speaking to NDTV, said the video will be examined and that action, if necessary, will be taken. This comes just a day after controversy erupted at an Amit Shah rally in New Delhi after a few people chanted the same slogan, as per a report in India Today. The BJP on Sunday distanced itself from such sloganeering, with Delhi party president Manoj Tiwari saying neither he nor the BJP supports such remarks, as per the report. On Thursday, Thakur caused a stir when he said “idle people were protecting perpetrators of violence”. In December, Delhi BJP leader Kapil Mishra, who defected from the AAP, at a rally in support of the CAA,  was accused of leading his supporters  in chanting ‘shoot the traitors’ From BCCI to Union Cabinet Born on 24 October, 1974, Thakur graduated from the Doaba College in Punjab’s Jalandhar, where his father used to teach before joining politics. Hailing from Samirpur village in Hamirpur district, Anurag Thakur was elected as an MP for the first time in a by-election in May 2008. He followed it up with successive victories in the 2009 and 2014 Lok Sabha elections.  The son of former chief minister Prem Kumar Dhumal, Thakur won the Hamirpur constituency for the fourth time by defeating Ram Lal Thakur of the Congress by nearly four lakh votes, a record margin for the constituency. He had got a vote share of 69.04 percent by bagging over  6.8 lakh votes. A former Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) president, Thakur led a march from Kolkata to Srinagar under the banner of ‘Rashtriya Ekta Yatra’ to unfurl the national flag at Lal Chowk on 26 January, 2011.  The 44-year-old was also the president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) from May 2016 to February 2017. The Supreme Court had ordered his ouster as the BCCI president in January that year for trying to hinder the implementation of the Lodha reforms. Later, he filed a petition in the apex court to get “his side of the story heard”. Thakur received the ‘Best Young Parliamentarian Award’ in 2011. He was also chief whip of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the Lok Sabha.