New Delhi: “A lesson must be taught” along the lines of Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza or India’s Operation Sindoor in Pakistan, West Bengal leader of opposition and BJP MLA Suvendu Adhikari said during a protest at the Bangladesh deputy high commission in Kolkata against Dipu Das’s lynching.“A lesson must be taught. Like Israel did in Gaza, India’s 100 crore Hindus—the government is working towards the welfare of Hindus. A lesson must be taught like India did to Pakistan during Operation Sindoor,” Adhikari told reporters after meeting the Bangladeshi deputy high commissioner on Friday (December 26) evening.After Hamas’s October 7, 2023 terror attack in Israel in which it killed some 1,200 people and took 250 others hostage, Tel Aviv launched a retaliatory military campaign in Gaza in which over 70,000 Palestinians were killed per the coastal strip’s health ministry, much of the territory was reduced to ruins and some districts slipped into conditions of famine.The scale of the destruction has elicited some scholars to compare Israel’s campaign to genocide.Following the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack in which 26 people were shot dead, India conducted airstrikes against nine sites identified as ‘terrorist infrastructure’ in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir as part of ‘Operation Sindoor’, triggering a four-day military conflict between the two sides.The Trinamool Congress said Adhikari’s remarks were ‘naked hate speech’ and a ‘bloodthirsty call for mass murder and ethnic cleansing’.Saying that the BJP has ‘perfected hate and intolerance into an artform’, the party in a statement on X on Saturday said Adhikari had ‘spewed genocidal bile’ with his statement and accused him of being a ‘Hitler in the making’.No FIR was lodged nor was Adhikari arrested or the anti-terror Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act invoked, it added. The party’s chairperson Mamata Banerjee is chief minister of West Bengal.Trinamool Rajya Sabha MP Sagarika Ghose also criticised Adhikari for using a “dog whistle” that the Modi government “is for ‘Hindus’ only”. “Dirty politics of Divide and Rule won’t work in Bengal,” she wrote on X on Saturday.Adhikari and a number of Hindu seers had marched to the Bangladeshi deputy high commission on Friday in protest against Hindu garment worker Das’s lynching in Bangladesh’s Mymensingh on December 18 by a mob that accused him of blasphemy. Das was lynched amid violence that broke out after youth leader Osman Hadi succumbed to gunshot injuries inflicted on him in Dhaka.Das’s killing has sparked protests in India, including in front of the Bangladeshi high commission in Delhi that reportedly involved around 400 people affiliated with the Vishva Hindu Parishad and its youth wing the Bajrang Dal, prompting New Delhi and Dhaka to summon each other’s envoys.Protests have also taken place outside the Bangladeshi deputy high commission in Kolkata.New Delhi on Friday condemned Das’s “gruesome” killing and said it “expect[s] that the perpetrators of the crime would be brought to justice”.“Over 2,900 incidents of violence against minorities, including cases of killings, arsons, land grab have been documented by independent sources during the tenure of the interim government. These incidents cannot be brushed aside as mere media exaggerations or dismissed as political violence,” external affairs ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said.Since Das’s murder, another Hindu man, Amrit Mondal, was beaten to death in Bangladesh’s Rajbari. Dhaka has claimed that Mondal’s killing was not communal in nature.The West Bengal leader of opposition, who is known to have made communal remarks in the past, said on Friday that he met the Bangladeshi deputy high commissioner in Kolkata on behalf of seers and “nationalist citizens”.They have just “one demand”, that the ‘killing of and atrocities against Hindus [in Bangladesh] be stopped’. “Or else, India’s 100 crore Hindus will do the work of teaching a lesson,” he said.He was told during the meeting that ten people were arrested in connection with Das’s killing, that they will not be granted bail and that they will be tried quickly, Adhikari told mediapersons.