Rahul Gandhi a 'Merchant of Hate', Says Piyush Goyal After Congress Attacks BJP on Alwar Lynching

New Delhi: Union minister Piyush Goyal on Monday called Congress president Rahul Gandhi a “merchant of hate”, asking him to “stop jumping with joy every time a crime happens”.

The interim finance minister was responding to Gandhi’s allegations that police took three hours to get the dying Alwar lynching victim to a hospital only a few kilometres away.

“Policemen in #Alwar took 3 hrs to get a dying Rakbar Khan, the victim of a lynch mob, to a hospital just 6 KM away. Why? They took a tea-break enroute. This is Modi’s brutal “New India” where humanity is replaced with hatred and people are crushed and left to die,” the Congress president had tweeted.

Responding to Gandhi’s charges, Goyal said the “state has already assured strict & prompt action” and the Congress president should stop shedding “crocodile tears”.

On Saturday, a Muslim dairy owner Rakbar Khan from Kolgaon village in Haryana’s Mewat district was lynched by a group of seven persons in Rajasthan’s Alwar district on suspicion of being a cattle smuggler.

Hours after the 28-year-old man was lynched Union minister Arjun Ram Meghwal came up with a bizarre link between the incident and Prime Minister Narendra Modi's growing popularity, hinting at a conspiracy to defame the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the central government ahead of 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

Following the lynching, the Rajasthan police arrested two of the accused — Dharmendra Yadav and Paramjeet Singh — on Saturday. A third person, Naresh Singh was held on Sunday.

All three accused were produced before the Ramgarh Judicial Magistrate, who remanded them in police custody for five days.

In 2017, Pehlu Khan, a dairy farmer, was accused of smuggling cattle and was lynched by a mob on the national highway in Rajasthan’s Alwar district.