New Delhi: The BJP alleged on Thursday that the Congress manufactured the theory of “Hindu terror” when it was in power to stop the rise of the saffron party and Narendra Modi, and appease its Muslim vote bank, as the ruling party welcomed the acquittal of all the seven accused in the Malegaon blast case.
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Ravi Shankar Prasad demanded that the discharged accused, including former party MP Pragya Singh Thakur and Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Purohit, should be compensated and the prosecution should apologise for allegedly using torture and planting evidence to frame them.
Action should be taken against the officials who allegedly tortured and framed them, Prasad said.
“The Congress can go to any extent to appease its vote bank. This case was a well-calculated conspiracy of the party for sheer vote-bank politics,” he said, calling it a historic day.
Prasad said the Congress’ “attempt to force onto the country the possibility of a Hindu terror organisation and saffron terrorism has fallen flat”.
He hit back at Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, who earlier dismissed questions related to the court verdict as an attempt to detract from real issues and hit out at the BJP-led Centre over US President Donald Trump’s critical comments on India’s economy.
Citing WikiLeaks reports of 2010, Prasad said Gandhi had, in 2009, told the US ambassador to India that extremist Hindu groups could be more dangerous than the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) terror outfit.
It is the same Rahul Gandhi who is now running away from truth, he said.
Rahul Gandhi and his mother, Sonia Gandhi, both former Congress presidents, should apologise to the country, Prasad demanded.
Prasad praised Purohit as a brave and decorated officer who fought against terrorism in Kashmir and Thakur as a “sant” (seer) and leader. He said both suffered for 17 years due to false charges and should be compensated.
Several other BJP leaders also expressed happiness at the court verdict, claiming that it proves that a Hindu can never be a terrorist, a statement Shah made in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday. BJP MP Nishikant Dubey said there is no such term as “saffron terrorism”. Hindus never indulge in such disgraceful acts, he asserted.
All the blasts that happened in the country between 2005 and 2013 were carried out at the behest of Pakistan, but the UPA government tried to create communal tensions instead of catching Pakistani terrorists, he alleged.
“Sanatan Dharma is sacred. A Hindu cannot be a terrorist,” said BJP’s IT department head Amit Malviya. The Hindu-terror bogey has been busted, BJP national spokesperson Gaurav Bhatia said after the verdict.
He added that it was not just a court verdict but a moral indictment of those who defamed an entire faith for electoral gains.
Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis hailed the verdict, saying “terrorism was never saffron and will never be”, while Deputy CM Eknath Shinde said the verdict has wiped off the stigma on the Hindu community.
Shinde claimed that Hindus can never engage in anti-national activities, and hit out at the Congress for coining the “absurd term of Hindu terrorism”.