New Delhi:
The viral clip was not the whole of it. Swatantra Bhardwaj’s vitriol lasted at least an hour in that podcast. The far-right influencer, detained on Friday for attacking a student-activist’s father at the Cockroach Janta Party protest in June, faced action mainly after a video clip went viral. In it, he bragged that he “cracked the skull” of a man whose daughter, a Dalit activist who is a minor, was among the protesters.
The clip was from an interview with a podcast channel in which he revealed at length his hatred for several sections, including Muslims, and made some wild claims about political patronage.
“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.
He went on, unbothered that he was on a public platform. The host smiled through it.
“I swear by this sacred thread (rakhi on his wrist),” he said, “Even seeing a burqa-clad woman makes me want to vomit. I have tried so hard to control it within myself because, after all, they are also human. 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.”
Bhardwaj, a prominent presence online who makes viral comments often indistinguishable from hate speech, called for an economic boycott of the minority community: “If you open my [UPI payment app]you won’t find any Muslim in the transaction history at all… I do not book cabs [run by Muslims]. Even if I am extremely thirsty and panting… even if my throat dries up and
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’.” The host continued to smile, nodding along. 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”.
“I have spent time in jail. I know very well what happens in jail,” he added, explaining with a twisted logic: “If you go to jail for acts such as harassing a girl or for petty theft, they will make you clean toilets with your hands. But if you go in for some patriotic work or after committing a murder, you will get respect, choco-pies, hot rice served inside your barrack, and all the big shots of the jail will sit with you. So I say, if the SC/ST Act is applied, shoot a bullet right there!”
After he was detained on Friday for assaulting the Dalit activist’s father, the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act was also invoked in the FIR against him. There were demands, including from the CJP, the Congress and prominent Dalit leaders such as MP Chandrashekhar Azad, that attempt-to-murder charges be added too. Police have said they will have the victim medically examined before a call on that. Initially, he was booked only on assault charges.
Bhardwaj gloated about the assault being akin to an attempt to murder. This is the part that has gone viral.
“We cracked open the head of [the girl’s] father. Do you know what section applies to this? Half-murder. (Section) 307 [109 as per the new Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita],” he said. He detailed the assault: “I had a heavy iron bangle (‘kada’) on my hand, with which I completely cracked open his skull. I didn’t know he was my [that girl’s] father. Now she is also on the target list, and this time some Kshatriya warrior woman will do the beating. The entire setup is ready. We are just waiting for an opportunity.”
“The man was dying, being taken in an ambulance. His daughter was standing outside the police station and saying that, if her father didn’t get justice, she would consume poison and die… We didn’t even go to jail. The whole world should know this. We didn’t even go to jail,” he further claimed.
(The girl has alleged death and rape threats after the incident, and Swatantra Bhardwaj was late night on September 4 booked also under the POCSO Act that deals with sexual crimes against minors.)
He said divine blessings saved him from being caught that day. 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. There is no official link between Bhardwaj and the BJP, as per information available.
Later in the interview, he said PM Modi was not hardline enough. “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.”
The podcast channel, on YouTube since 2023, has hosted several right-wing personalities. The podcast with Bhardwaj was going viral quickly after the clip circulated, and the case blew up after Thursday.
What He Said As Arrest Loomed
Bhardwaj presented an unbothered disposition mid-day Friday, too, as he spoke to NDTV.
“I struck [the girl’s] father on the head with my ‘kada’ (iron bracelet) in self-defence,” he claimed, and expressed no remorse.
He further said that he would do it again if attempts were made to target him. “If I am cornered like that again and attempts are made to target me, I will strike with my ‘kada’ once more,” he said.
A number of his older videos of violent speech and actions, including threats to actor Swara Bhasker, are also going viral since.
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