The Bharatiya Janata Party on Wednesday said that the former civil servants’s letter accusing the government of “striking fear” among minorities was written to spread misinformation, PTI reported.
The letter did not mention welfare measures offered by the Modi-led government, including free ration to the impoverished and free precautionary Covid-19 vaccines, said BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra. “There is a specific agenda behind this letter to spread misinformation and create distrust in the country,” he added.
A group of ex-civil servants wrote an open letter to Modi on Tuesday, stating that the government was using legal means to deprive minority communities of their livelihood and forcing them to accept their status as “inferior citizens”.
“We are witnessing a frenzy of hate-filled destruction in the country where at the sacrificial altar are not just Muslims and members of the other minority communities but the Constitution itself,” the signatories had said.
While it was not clear if the political leadership was directly involved in creating a communal frenzy, it was evident that the administration was enabling fringe groups to operate without fear, they said.
The members of fringe groups that are tasked with committing violence are provided with a “master script” about how the propaganda machinery of a party can help them defend their actions, the signatories said.
They noted that similar incidents of communal violence had taken place earlier too. But currently, not only a master plan was being unveiled to prepare a base for creating a Hindu Rashtra but the Constitution was being being “twisted and perverted to make it an instrument of majoritarian tyranny”.
Given this, the group said it was no wonder bulldozer has become a new metaphor for exercising political and administrative power.
The BJP has earned the sobriquet of “bulldozer government” after several of its leaders have arbitrarily called for demolition of “illegal structures” in various states. Leaders like Adityanath have even said that the “bulldozer brand” is quite effective. However, the structures that are razed most often belong to Muslims.
In Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Delhi, the BJP had conducted drives in the name of removing encroachments to demolish structures in areas where communal clashes took place in April.
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