Letter to BS: Congress kept Muslims in fear of BJP to control the vote bank

Reading letters of G David Milton, including “Shallow pitch” are always amusing. His tendency to see all Narendra Modi and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) actions through his glasses of bias is not surprising. For him, pitting the Dalit-Muslim combine against OBC/upper castes, and pitting the Yadav/Muslim combine against others is secularism. 

The Congress party kept Muslims in fear of the BJP to control the vote bank. This is secular for him. All the development of infrastructure like roads, availability of power etc is enjoyed by all communities. The official figure of murders in West Bengal (under the Congress rule) in 1970 was 436, in 1971 it was 1,169. Between April 1970 to March 1972, more than 600 CPI (M) cadres were murdered. 

Then Congress MLA (he's moved to TMC since then) Sadhan Pande in 1989 claimed that more than 1,000 Congress workers were killed between 1977 and 1989 during the CPI(M) rule. In 2013, Rahul Gandhi had said that 25,000 Muslims will die if Modi is elected. A few stray cases of attacks on Muslims exposes false claim of “seculars” -- that is, Modi is anti-Muslim. I am not justifying these attacks on Muslims but putting them in perspective. In fact, we had far more peaceful five years compared to the Congress raj. I wonder why the word minority is appropriated by Muslims alone when we have many other minorities like Sikhs, Jains, Jews, Christians etc.

Abhay Dixit via email

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