RSS leader Ravinder Gosain was shot dead by unidentified men on a motorcycle in Ludhiana on Tuesday – making it the fourth such attack on men of the organisation in the last one-and-a-half year and the seventh unsolved murder of religious leaders or followers in Punjab.

The police see a pattern in the killings. “It is too much of a coincidence, though the police are probing a personal angle to each attack,” a senior officer said. That Gosain was killed on the day home minister Rajnath Singh visited the state means the assailants want to give out a message, the officer added, according to a report in The Tribune.

Gosain, officebearer of the district BJP, suffered two bullet injuries – in the head and shoulder – while he was returning home from an RSS shakha.

Last year, Brig VK Gagneja (retd), vice-president of RSS Punjab unit, was gunned down in Jalandhar; Mata Chand Kaur, of the prominent Namdhari sect, was killed outside the sect headquarters at Bhaini Sahib, near Ludhiana; and Durga Prasad Gupta, head of Punjab Shiv Sena’s labour wing, was shot dead in Khanna, again Ludhiana.

This January, Amit Sharma, publicity manager of Sri Hindu Takht, was gunned down in Ludhiana; father-son Satpal and Ramesh, followers of Dera Sacha Sauda, were murdered in February by two assailants and Sultan Masih, pastor of a local church in Ludhiana, was shot at outside his house in July.

In 2009, Rulda Singh, state chief of Rashtriya Sikh Sangat, an RSS affiliate, was killed in a similar way. Another RSS leader, Naresh Kumar, escaped with injuries when two motorcycle-borne assailants opened fire at him in January last year.

The AAP condemned Gosain’s murder and accused the Congress government led by Captain Amarinder Singh of failing to protect lives.