Short Takes
Honoured for hate speech, mass murder
Dr Mohammad Manzoor Alam on the blatant use by BJP of hate mongering and violence in UP to garner the Hindu vote.
The BJP crossed all limits of public decency when it honoured its MLAs Sangeet Som and Suresh Rana at Narendra Modi’s rally in Agra on November 21. These two men have been charged with using hate speech against Muslims to incite large-scale violence in Muzaffarnagar.
Unrepentant about the misdeeds of its leaders, the BJP has truly and conclusively proved itself to be the Riot Party of India. It is trying to hide its shame behind the fig leaf of the argument that these MLAs have not so far been convicted.
Conscious of its hypocrisy being obvious to people, the party honoured these men before Modi came on the stage. The message was clear: the act of honouring these men had no reflection on Modi’s “clean” image as it was not being done in his presence. In a great display of crynicism, the party was trying to protect the newly-secular image of Modi from its stinkingly communal gesture.
The simple fact that the notorious, riot-tainted Amit Shah as the poll campaign head of UP shows that BJP wants to polarise and divide the society, besides inflicting death and injury on hapless Indians, to reap the harvest of Hindu vote. The vote is being sought in the name of “development,” while a subtle message is being passed on that it is actually about staging anti-Muslim riots.
Such a blatant act of collective endorsement of communal violence by UP’s top BJP brass shows that the state is standing on a tinder box that my explode any moment. The social fabric of the state is in tatters thanks to the vicious politics of BJP. The Akhilesh Yadav government, with its acts of omission and commission, has not helped matters.
The Samajwadi Party will find in the next state election how misguided it is to run with the hare and hunt with the hound. There is every possibility that it will spend five years in the political wilderness where it will have enough time to brood over what went wrong.
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