Within hours of this ghastly murder, the news spread and engulfed whole of the party with deep sense of grief. Many units immediately protested and demanded arrest of Deepak Verma and Ravindra Rai. Protest demonstrations were held on Jan 17 in Delhi; Ranchi and all other major centres in Jharkhand; all the districts in Bihar; many places in Tamil Nadu including Chennai; Allahabad, Varanasi, Pilibhit, Balia, Sonbhadra, Jalaun and many other places in UP; Kakinada, Yeleswaram, Jagampeta, Prathipadu, Thondangi, Sakhavaram, Tuni and many places in East Godavari district in Andhra Pradesh. Protests demonstrations were also held at Kolkata, Guwahati, Bhubaneshwar, Karnal and Pondicherry.
The Bihar unit of the Party launched protests on 17 January throughout the state and organised marches and demonstrations at almost all centres. In Uttarakhand, the Party observed a Protest Day on 20 January, holding protests all over the state.
In Andhra Pradesh, 300 people participated in a protest rally at Kakinada, which passed through the main road from party office and culminated in a condolence meeting. It was led by Comrades N.Murthy, B.Bangarrao, B.Viplav Kumar and others. At Yeleswaram, 200 people held a protest rally and rastaroko for an hour, while well-attended protest marches were also held in the mandal towns of Jaggampeta, Pratipadu, Thondangi, Sankhavaram, Tuni, Routhulapudi, Jangareddy Gudem (West Godavari) and Chatrai (Krishna district).
Students of JNU held a protest procession on the night of the murder. In Delhi, angry protesters, including students, workers as well as writers and journalists including Anand Swaroop Varma, Anil Chamadiya, Javed Naqvi and Lata Jishnu, stormed the Parliament Street and broke the police cordon demanding arrest and removal of Giridih SP Deepak Verma for masterminding the state-sponsored political killing of Comrade Mahendra Singh. They said that Giridih SP had a record of several cases of human rights violations and contract killings. They also demanded immediate intervention by the Election Commission to ensure the removal of this SP for free and fair elections.
A Sankalp Sabha in memory of Comrade Mahendra’s murder was organised at Delhi at Gandhi Peace Foundation on 21 January. Among those who paid tribute to Comrade Mahendra Singh in this meeting were the Hindi poet Alok Dhanwa, the cultural activist Shubhendu Ghosh, prominent journalists and civil liberties activists Kuldeep Nayyar, Praful Bidwai, Gautam Naulakha, Anand Swaroop Varma, Abhay Dube and Anil Chamadiya, Delhi University Professors and activist Tripta Wahi, editor of Revolutionary Democracy, Vijay Singh, Manoranjan Mohanty from Delhi University, democratic rights activists like Nandini Sundar of PUDR and N D Pancholi of PUCL, CPI leader Comrade D Raja, Comrade Prakash Rao of Communist Gadar Party of India, senior socialist thinker Surendra Mohan, Dr. Suneelam, MLA from the Samajwadi Party, Vijay Pratap of Lokayan, Thomas Matthew, NBA activist Chittaroopa Palit, AICCTU leader Santosh Rai and CPI(ML) CC Member Kumudini Pati. The Meeting passed a resolution calling upon all democratic and justice loving forces to rise against this murder of democracy in Jharkhand, and demanded punishment for the killers – Deepak Verma and Ravindra Rai. q