At a Maharana Pratap Jayanti Shaurya Yatra, self-proclaimed cow vigilante Abhishek Thakur defended the life imprisonment of seven men convicted in the 2022 mob lynching of Najir Ahmed. Referring to alleged cow slaughterers as “jihadis,” he justified vigilante violence against them and declared that if protecting cows makes them “gundas,” then they are proud to be “gundas.”