BJP and Congress clash over ‘Hindu terror’

New Delhi: The BJP and the Congress yet again locked horns on over “Hindu terror” on Saturday. 

 

While a combative Congress nudged the Narendra Modi government on “Hindu terror” by asking who had released dreaded terrorists and accompanied them to Kandahar, and why the NIA was going slow on the bomb blasts in Malegaon, Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad, in Ajmer and on the Samjhauta Express, the BJP responded by saying that the “Congress has not learnt its lessons” and raked up Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi’s remarks of 2010 on radical groups.

 

Reacting to Union home minister Rajnath Singh’s move to target the Congress by referring to “Hindu terror”, Leader of  the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad said the BJP was trying to “polarise the nation on communal lines”. 

 

Asking the BJP “not to give lectures on terrorism”, he sought to remind them of the Kandahar hijacking and pointed out how Indira Gandhi, former PM Rajiv Gandhi, Punjab chief minister Beant Singh and V.C. Shukla had been martyred in terrorist attacks.

 

Mr Azad said Mr Singh quoted the UPA home minister’ (Sushilkumar Shinde’s) statement on “Hindu terrorism” out of context because it was “a deliberate attempt on the part (sic) of the home minister, for various reasons, to divide the country, to take up the debate between two religions, to divert the attention of the people from its failures to effectively counter the threat of terrorism, to use the parliamentary forum, to abuse and defame its opponents, particularly Congress”.