April 13
India’s ruling, Bhartiya Janta Party has been accused of promoting communal tensions after their official twitter handle promised to rid the country of all “infiltrators” in an apparent swipe at Muslims and other religious minorities.
“We will remove every single infiltrator from the country, except Buddha, Hindus and Sikhs,” Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Amit Shah told supporters in West Bengal
He promised to do so by implementing the National Registry of Citizens nationwide. The NRC is a hugely controversial policy mooted last year in Assam, a region of India which shares a porous border with Bangladesh.
Proponents of the registry say it will help root out illegal Bangladeshi immigrants, but the move has prompted fears of possible deportation among Assam’s hundreds of thousands of Bengali-speaking Muslims, with an estimated 4 million people’s citizenship at risk.
In his speech, Shah said the government “won’t send the Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians and Buddhists coming in from Bangladesh or Pakistan because they are our brothers and they’ve come here because they’ve faced persecution in those countries.”
“To a refugee in West Bengal, I want to say, you don’t have to be afraid of anyone. We treat a refugee here as a son and daughter of India and they will be given citizenship,” he added. “The BJP’s pledge is to get rid of the infiltrators.”
A Hindu nationalist party, the BJP has long faced accusations of anti-Muslim rhetoric.
As chief minister of Gujarat, Modi faced local and international criticism for violent rioting along communal lines in 2002 in which more 1,000 people were killed, most of them Muslims. He has never faced charges in connection with violence.