No action against right-wing terror by UPA and NDA

The erstwhile Congress-led UPA and the current BJP-led NDA dispensations have been obfuscating on the matter of cracking down on "right-wing terror", a group of activists said.

Under the banner of the Bharat Bachao Andolan, activists demanded that the Sanatan Sanstha be banned and its founder Dr Jayant Athawale be arrested forthwith in the wake of the recent crackdown by the CBI and the Anti-Terrorism Squad of the Maharashtra police.

In a joint statement, activists such as Tushar Gandhi, Nikhil Wagle, Charul Joshi, Jatin Desai, Noorjehan Safia Niyaz, Feroze Mithiborwala, Varsha Vidya Vilas and Jyoti Badekar said, "We, as a nation, must unite to counter the scourge of terrorism and thus pressurise the government and the investigating agencies to crackdown on all such terrorist organisations. If not, we will witness the assassinations of even more writers and intellectuals and the death of more innocent people in terror attacks."

They pointed out that the Sanatan Sanstha emerged as a suspect in 2006 during the Nanded blasts. In 2008, they threw bombs to disrupt plays in Thane and Vashi, for which their members were convicted. They were also involved in 2009 in the Goa blasts.

In 2011, the then Prithviraj-Maharashtra government submitted a 1,000-page dossier in this regard, but the Mamohan Singh government did not start any legal process to ban the organisation.

In 2015, the Devendra Fadnavis government too sent its report, but again, there was no action from the Narendra Modi government.

The key suspects identified and arrested for the assassinations of Gauri Lankesh, Dr Narendra Dhabholkar, Prof MM Kalburgi and Govind Pansare all come from extreme right-wing Hindutva organisations, with the Sanatan Sanstha playing the main role, the reports had pointed out.