KOLKATA: Breaking his silence, Prime Minister Narendra Modi today described the Dadri lynching and opposition to Ghulam Ali’s concert as “undesirable and unfortunate” and made clear his government had nothing to do with them but accused the opposition of indulging in “pseudo secularism” and politics of polarization.
He also charged that the opposition was using minorities as vote bank by raising the bogey of communalism.
“The Dadri incident or opposition to Pakistani singer is undesirable and unfortunate. But what is the central government’s relation with these incidents”, Modi told Bengali daily Ananda Bazar Patrika.
This is the first time that the Prime Minister has spoken directly on the Dadri incident, where a Muslim man was killed over rumors of beef eating, though last week he had made a strong plea that Hindus and Muslims should not fight each other but poverty. He had also referred to the President’s call for maintaining India’s core values of tolerance and mutual respect.
The Prime Minister had made his remarks last week in an election meeting after coming under attack for his “silence” on the Dadri incident.
This was also his first reaction to the Ghazal concert cancellation forced by BJP’s ally Shiv Sena’s threat to disrupt the event last week in Mumbai.
On his party’s stand (on such incidents), Modi said, “BJP never supported such kind of incidents. The opposition is raising the bogey of communalism against BJP bringing those incidents, but are they themselves not doing politics of polarization”.
He said, “Such debate has taken place in the past. BJP always opposed pseudo-secularism. Now again this debate is taking place in the face of unfortunate social malaise”.
“This debate can be resolved through dialogue and discussion,” he said.
Modi claimed those parties were resorting to such propaganda which did not want the development of minorities and look at them as vote banks.–PTI
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