NEW DELHI, March 23: India’s Election Commission found the great-grandson of India’s first prime minister guilty of hate speech and inciting violence against Muslims, and urged his party to drop him as a candidate in the upcoming elections, officials said on Monday.

The decision, which was released late Sunday, came after footage emerged of 29-year-old Varun Gandhi, who is seeking a seat in parliament for the first time, comparing a rival Muslim politician to Osama bin Laden and threatening to cut the throats of Muslims during two political rallies earlier this month.

“The two speeches contained highly derogatory references and seriously provocative language of a wholly unacceptable nature,” the Election Commission statement said.

The commission said that while it lacked the authority to bar Varun from the elections unless he had been convicted by a court, it called on the BJP not to let him run, saying it would be “perceived as endorsing his unpardonable acts of inciting violence and creating feelings of enmity and hatred between different classes of citizens of India”.—AP
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