A collective formed in 2015 to protest against the Narendra Modi government’s bid to dilute the land acquisition law urged all opposition parties on Thursday to mobilise opinion for the resignation of Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath over the Bulandshahr violence.

The Bhumi Adhikar Andolan said the violence — that left a police officer and a local youth dead after carcasses of dead cows were found in a field — was a conspiracy to trigger riots across the country ahead of next year’s parliamentary elections.

Andolan members, who visited the family of slain inspector Subodh Kumar Singh, said the chief minister had pre-judged the investigations by calling the December 3 incident an “accident” at the outset itself.

“It is only now that he is talking of a conspiracy,” All India Kisan Sabha general secretary Hannan Mollah told a media conference.

Speaking on the Bulandshahr incident days after the violence, Adityanath had said it was an accident and the law was taking its course. On Wednesday, he said it was a political conspiracy.

The Andolan members now plan to visit the affected area in Bulandshahr next week as part of a fact-finding effort.

CPM Lok Sabha MP Jitendra Choudhury, who was part of the delegation, said the family was disappointed with the manner in which inspector Singh was left to deal with the mob on his own by his juniors and seniors alike; very unlike the “esprit de corps” that security personnel show in such situations.

The police officer, he said, had been attacked with knives before being shot. “There were 24 knife/sword wounds on his body and no effort was made to call for reinforcements in the two hours that the mob went on the rampage.”

The violence had taken place after cow carcasses were found in a field in a village when thousands of Muslims were in Bulandshahr for a religious meet. The field’s owner wanted to bury the carcasses but “outsiders” led by Bajrang Dal district convener Yogesh Raj had taken the carcasses to a police outpost and resorted to vandalism. Yogesh is absconding.

Choudhury and his Rajya Sabha party colleague K.K. Ragesh had given notice for raising the issue in the two Houses of Parliament on Thursday but were unable to do so.

The Andolan has said the ongoing investigation would yield no result as the government appears to care more about cow slaughter than the killing of a police officer. It has called for a high court-monitored probe into the whole incident and also its link to the fact that inspector Singh had investigated the lynching of Mohammad Akhlaque in Dadri in September 2015.

Akhlaque was beaten to death on the unsubstantiated suspicion that he had stored beef in his house.

On Tuesday, 83 retired senior bureaucrats had, in an open letter, urged people to mount pressure for Adityanath’s resignation, calling the Bulandshahr violence a conspiracy that “marks the most dangerous turn yet in the direction taken by the politics of hate in recent times”.