Adityanath and HYV's strategy is to turn local confrontations between communities into cases of Hinduism under threat. For example, they escalated a dispute between a Hindu and a Muslim over who spat paan on whom into a full-blown communal confrontation in 2002. They played a similar role in the Mau riots of 2005. In October 2015, the group offered guns to Hindus close to where a Muslim man, Mohammed Ikhlaq, was murdered by Hindutva activists after his family were accused of storing beef.