BJP parliamentarian Varun Gandhi on Thursday uploaded on social media an old video of Atal Bihari Vajpayee warning the government against intimidating farmers or trying to crush their peaceful protest, sending a message to his party and the Narendra Modi regime.

Varun, who has been seeking justice for the farmers mowed down in Lakhimpur Kheri by a Union minister’s jeep in which his son was allegedly present, and persistently raising the larger issue of the peasants’ movement against the farm laws, prefaced the video with the tweet: “Wise words from a big-hearted leader.”

Vajpayee was the BJP’s first Prime Minister and the party’s biggest leader before Modi.

In the short clip, from 1980 according to the video, Vajpayee says: “I want to warn the government against intimidating farmers. Don’t try to scare, these farmers are not going to be scared. We don’t want to use the farmers’ movement for politics.”

Indira Gandhi, Varun’s grandmother, was Prime Minister in 1980.

Vajpayee continues: “We support their (farmers’) genuine demands. If the government tries to suppress them, misuse laws or repress the peaceful movement of the farmers, we will join the protests.”

The Modi government has been accused of using every trick to suppress the farmers’ peaceful movement against the three laws. It has termed the protest politically motivated and tried to defame the farmers. Sections of BJP leaders have been particularly targeting the Sikhs who are leading the protest from the front, branding them Khalistanis.

For 10 months, thousands of farmers have braved extreme weather and camped on the highways outside Delhi but Modi has not met them to hear their grievances about laws that affect their lives and livelihood.

The brutality reached a crescendo when four farmers and a journalist returning from a protest were crushed under the wheels of a Thar jeep belonging to Union minister Ajay Mishra Teni in Lakhimpur Kheri on October 3. The jeep hit the farmers from behind and ploughed through them. The minister’s son Ashis Mishra, alleged to have been in the vehicle, was arrested after six days. Teni, who had earlier publicly warned the farmers he would fix them in two minutes, remains Modi’s minister of state for home.

The government did not condemn the murders, choosing silence till finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman was confronted with questions on a visit to the US on Tuesday. Ten days after the crime, Sitharaman acknowledged it was “absolutely condemnable”.

Varun has been publicly supporting the farmers’ movement since the Muzaffarnagar mahapanchayat of the protesters last month. He had tweeted that the lakhs of farmers who had gathered were “our own flesh and blood” and stressed the need for “understanding their pain”.

The MP has sought justice for those killed in Lakhimpur Kheri. “The video is crystal clear. Protesters cannot be silenced through murder...,” Varun had tweeted, sharing a video of the farmers being run over by the Thar jeep and saying “justice must be delivered”.

Soon after, the BJP dropped Varun and his mother Maneka Gandhi, also an MP, from the party’s national executive committee.