Days after clarifying his act of garlanding eight people convicted of lynching a man to death over allegations of cow slaughter, Union Minister Jayant Sinha on Wednesday expressed regret over the incident. Sinha had felicitated the men at his residence on the outskirts of Hazaribagh after the Jharkhand High Court suspended their life term and granted them bail.

“I have earlier also said that law will take its own course. Guilty will be punished & innocent will be spared. If by garlanding those men (Ramgarh lynching case convicts), an impression has gone out that I support such vigilantism then I express regret,” Jayant Sinha told reporters.

Sinha, the son of former BJP leader Yashwant Sinha, said all that he was doing was “honouring the due process of law”.

On Tuesday, Congress president Rahul Gandhi supported a petition against Sinha that sought withdrawal of his Harvard alumnus status after he felicitated the convicted men.

The petition was launched by a student of Master of Public Policy at Harvard University, Boston, in the US from where Sinha had also graduated, and sought that his alumnus status be withdrawn for “honouring criminals”.

The petition to the president of Harvard University, Boston, criticised the minister’s action, saying it “has shocked the nation and brought disrepute to the institution”.

After supporting the petition, Gandhi took to Twitter and urged other people also to sign the petition against Sinha.

“If the sight of a highly educated MP and central minister, Jayant Sinha, garlanding and honouring criminals convicted of lynching an innocent man, fills you with disgust, click on the link and support this petition,” Gandhi wrote on Twitter.

In March this year, a fast track court in Jharkhand sentenced 11 people to life imprisonment for lynching coal trader Alimuddin Ansari on June 29, 2017, on the suspicion that he was carrying beef. However, the Jharkhand High Court granted bail to one of the accused on June 8, and eight others on June 29.

On July 6, these eight men met Jayant Sinha, who had earlier supported them, and he garlanded them,  welcoming the court decision. Sinha’s action invited flak from all quarters, including his father and former BJP minister Yashwant Sinha. Former Mumbai Police commissioner Julio Ribeiro, former chief information commissioner Wajahat Habibullah and 41 other retired bureaucrats have demanded that Sinha be sacked for felicitating the eight convicts.

Meanwhile, the HC granted bail to one more person in the case on 10 July, citing  lack of evidence.