Congress leader and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Thursday said that some people are “spreading negative influence in the name of religion”. He made the remark during an Eid Milan festival in Delhi on Thursday, hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi condemned killing in the name of cow worship.
“We have to stay in brotherhood and create an atmosphere that is in accordance with the path shown by our Constitution and the law,” he said, according to NDTV. “We the people living in India will have to protect it by walking together shoulder to shoulder,” Financial Express quoted him as saying. “People are spreading negative influences in the name of religion.”
Hours earlier, Modi had said nobody in the country had the right to take the law into their own hands, and that there is no place for violence in a society and that violence has never resolved any problem.
Singh’s and Modi’s comments came a day after thousands of citizens across the country took to the streets to protest against the recent lynching of Muslims and other incidents of communal and caste-based violence. The latest in this string of incidents is the killing of a young Muslim boy aboard a local train to Ballabhgarh, Haryana, on June 22. Junaid was travelling home after Eid shopping in Delhi with some friends and relatives. A group of men made communal remarks about him and his companions after they refused to give up their seats for them. The men then assaulted them, and Junaid died as a result of the injuries he had sustained.
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