Environmental rights activist RS Mugilan on Tuesday appeared before the Aruna Jegadeesan Commission investigating the police firing during the anti-Sterlite protests in Tamil Nadu’s Thoothukudi district on May 22 last year, in which 13 people were killed, The New Indian Express reported.
He demanded that the commission question Congress leader Rahul Gandhi for linking the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh with the police firing. He was purportedly referring to Gandhi’s tweet from May 23, when he had alleged that the RSS and Bharatiya Janata Party were behind the police firings.
“Tamils are being brutally killed because they are refusing to bow to the RSS philosophy,” Gandhi had written in a tweet. “The bullets of RSS and Modi can never crush the spirit of the Tamil people. Tamil brothers and sisters, we are with you!”
Mugilan also submitted the evidence he had collected in the case during his questioning. Mugilan was missing for five months earlier this year. He had reportedly “disappeared” after he addressed a press conference in Chennai on February 15 after he accused senior police officials of orchestrating violence, in connivance with the management of Sterlite Copper. He was found in July and detained by the police at the Tirupati railway station in Andhra Pradesh.
On Monday, he had told the court that his kidnappers had threatened him to “stop working against Sterlite”. In an affidavit, he also claimed that they had threatened to “embarrass me in public and forcibly injected drugs to keep me unconscious”. However, the Madras High Court on Wednesday dismissed the affidavit as a “cock and bull story”, The Times of India reported.
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