Siwan: A senior journalist was shot dead in Bihar’s Siwan district on Friday evening. Rajdev Ranjan, the bureau chief of Hindi daily ‘Hindustan’, was shot from close range in the head and the neck by bike-borne assailants.
Police said that the incident happened when Ranjan was going on his motorcycle near the fruit market on Station Road under Town police station at around 7:45 PM.
Superintendent of Police Saurabh Kumar Sah said that Ranjan, 45, died on the way to hospital. The SP said the motive behind the murder was yet to be ascertained.
Ranjan has been writing for a long time against law-breakers of the area. The killing triggered a wave of protests by mediapersons in Bihar.
Meanwhile, the BJP attacked CM Nitish Kumar for the deteriorating law and order situation in the state which it dubbed as ‘maha jungle raj’. Party spokesperson Shahnawaz Hussain said that while the ‘Chief Minister was visiting Benaras, the people of the state were migrating out from the state as criminals were ruling the roost’.
He also described the killing of a journalist Rajdev Ranjan, in Siwan as an ‘attack on the fourth pillar of democracy’. “Chief Nitish Kumar, who also holds charge of Home department, is moving around in Benaras and even journalists are not being spared in Bihar. Law and order situation in Bihar has turned so bad that people are migrating out. It is not ‘jungle raj’ but ‘maha jungle raj’,” he said.
The BJP leader said 11 crore people of Bihar had elected Nitish Kumar as their Chief Minister with the hope of orderly rule in the state where lives of everyone were protected.
“Today, criminals are ruling the roost in Bihar and not law and order. When ruling party leaders and legislators are involved in crime, how can one expect the law and order to be normal and when asked the chief minister avoids answering the issue of rising crime. He talks of Bihar being liquor-free, but the state has become full of crime instead,” he said.
The murder comes days after a road rage case in Gaya, in which JD(U) MLC Manorama Devi’s son killed a class 12 student for overtaking his vehicle.
In Jharkhand, Akhilesh Pratap Singh (35), a journalist of a news channel, was gunned down by unidentified people at Dewaria in Chatra district.
Singh was attacked near panchayat secretariat of the village last night, a police official said.
Chief Minister Raghubar Das condemned the incident and asked Director General of Police DK Pandey to arrest the assailants at the earliest.
A delegation of local journalists met Deputy Commissioner Amit Kumar and Superintendent of Police Anjani Kumar Jha and demanded adequate compensation to the family of the victim.
PTI