Bharat mata row is Opposition plot in election season: Akbar

The controversy with respect to the chant of Bharat Mata Ki Jai has been created by a desperate Opposition ahead of elections to five states, according to MJ Akbar, national spokesperson for the BJP.

He said this while speaking on the subject of ‘intolerance and the media’ hosted by the BJP Media Cell on Friday at the Press Club here.

Great stirring

“The Opposition is aiming to deceive people one more time. But the young voters are not willing to listen. A great stirring is going on in them.”

Akbar said there is a strong undercurrent being spearheaded by the young people who want jobs, self-respect, vision and future. They are beginning to believe that they have got a Prime Minister who is on track to deliver.

As for intolerance, the era seems to have suddenly ended. At least nobody is returning awards these days, Akbar said while ridiculing those who indulged in the act ‘in the run-up to the Bihar elections.’ After the Bihar elections, ‘great tolerance’ seems to have prevailed over the country.

“These are all political projects intended to deflect people from what they truly need — which is liberation from poverty and hunger.”

Political project

Intolerance is not a media project. The media is not intolerant. Intolerance is a political project. Media is only a mirror of the political situation that has been deliberately and artificially engineered for political purposes.

And media is a mirror of everything. Sometimes that mirror exaggerates, sometimes distorts. But the mirror does not generate or create fire. It is the politics and some politicians who create the fire.

And this particular round of fire has been created by the Left in cahoots with the Congress. An artificial climate is being created with which a new kind of division is being engineered. And it has a political purpose, Akbar said.

The whole objective is how to deflect the country and the government from a very clear and undiluted mission enumerated many times by the Prime Minister, a mission of development and jobs for all with no community or section being left behind.

Value system

“I’ve a problem with the word tolerance. It reeks of patronage. As if I’m doing you a very big favour by tolerating you. But our country has believed for thousands of years in faith equality.”

The Prime Minister has spoken about the value system that emerges from treating the whole world as a family. But Congress President Sonia Gandhi has indulged in grandstanding at the cost of this country’s civilisational values when she says that our secularism is under threat.

Whoever thinks that out faith equality is under stress has never woken up in the morning, Akbar said. “Because when you wake up in the morning, the first thing that you will hear every morning is the azan. The second thing you hear is temple bells. The third, Guru Granth Sahib being recited from some Gurudwaras. And the fourth, church bells on Sundays. There is no country in the world where you can here all these.”

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