Vinayakrao Deshpande

Class:

Activist, Anti-Muslim Bigot, Anti-Muslim Bigotry, Islamophobe, Islamophobia, Profile

Islamophobic Remarks :

The Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s current organizing secretary general is Vinayakrao Deshpande. He formerly served as the group’s international general secretary.

Deshpande is well recognized among the Sangh leadership circles despite keeping a relatively modest public image. He frequently speaks at camps where VHP militants receive judo, karate, and guns instruction.

He was a proponent of the love jihad conspiracy theory way back when. In August 2014, he stated: “This problem impacts more than a lakh girls annually in the nation. After counseling, the VHP has previously saved over 10,000 girls, and many of them remarried Hindu boys.

Deshpande frequently vilifies and demonizes Muslim and Christian minorities, accusing them erroneously of participating in a foreign plot to convert members of scheduled caste and tribal communities.

Additionally, he views the market’s availability of Halal-marked goods as an issue and expresses “serious concern” for the nation.

“Efforts are being made in the billions and trillions to do the business of Halal Marked items nowadays. The money made from this is going to support more terrorist organizations. Within the nation, there are about 100 businesses that use the Halal mark. He urged the people of India to avoid buying anything marked “Halal.”

(In 2018, the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) World Factbook classified the VHP as a militant religious group. Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a far-right Hindu nationalist party founded in 1925 in the style of staunch nationalist organizations in Europe, seeks to establish an ethnically Hindu-majority state in India. VHP is an affiliate of RSS. VHP is accused of organising many attacks on Muslims and Christians in hundreds of riots across the nation as part of its decades-long quest to convert India into a Hindu nation.)