All India Majlis-E-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) chief Asaduddin Owaisi on Saturday hit out at Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders, including Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, for giving the bone-chilling Shraddha Walkar murder case a “religious angle” and said that the incident is not about “love jihad”.
“Himanta should understand this; he is a chief minister. Love is love, there is no jihad. The term love jihad is completely obnoxious. Why is he bringing the law against it? He is trying to create hatred in Assam,” Owaisi said at Agenda Aaj Tak.
Sarma, during the recently concluded Municipal Corporation of Delhi election, had demanded a stringent law against love jihad as he raised the issue of the gruesome Mehrauli killing.
Love jihad is a term often used by the BJP and Hindu right-wing leaders to refer to illegal religious conversions allegedly through force or deceit.
“I even asked BJP leaders to provide data on love jihad, but they didn’t give any data in Parliament,” Owaisi said.
Owaisi had earlier said the BJP’s politics over the issue was completely wrong. “It’s not an issue of love jihad but of exploitation and abuse against a woman and that is how it should be viewed and condemned,” Owaisi said.
Owaisi also refuted charges of vote cutting in the Gujarat assembly election and said the reason the BJP was winning because it has more Hindu votes. Owaisi slammed the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party alleging that the political fight was now about who is a “bigger Hindu” than Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
