The murder of four farmers at Uttar Pradesh's Lakhimpur Kheri after allegedly being run over by a BJP minister's son on Sunday, 3 October, has outraged the nation. The incident occurred at a venue where the farmers were protesting against the three new agricultural laws - a protest that has been held country-wide since the three laws were introduced in 2020.
While many in the legacy media have termed these deaths as a results of "clashes", "conflicts", and "protests turned violent", others have asked that these deaths be called by no other name than "murder".
Why, you may ask? Well, many believe that the act of violence against the farmers was a culmination of repeated statements made by several legislators to dehumanise and defame the protests, the protestors and their cause. Statements of these nature, made several times since the protests began, have more often than not, also gone unchecked and unpunished.
Many say that this normalisation of calls for violence against farmers and labelling them as "dangerous" has led to the horror that is the Lakhimpur Kheri incident. In that sense, the violence is a culmination of the demonisation of the farmers' protests since it began.
So, while many acclaimed journalists have gained access to the "sequence of events" that led to the incident from "top sources in the BJP", we thought that we'd put out a sequence of our own. And, well, no top sources needed to be consulted for this one.