The recent controversy about the chanting of ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’ was artificially created by Opposition parties ahead of the elections in five States. This is being done to deflect attention from the mission of development that the government has undertaken, BJP national spokesperson M. J. Akbar has said.
He was speaking on the topic “Intolerance and the Media’ at a programme organised by the BJP media cell here on Friday.
The furore over intolerance is not a media project. The media is not intolerant. The intolerance debate is a political project artificially engineered for political gains and aims. The media is a mirror of all this. The mirror sometimes distorts and exaggerates. But the fire has not been not lit by the media. It is politics and certain politicians who lit the fire, he said.
This particular round of fire has been created by the Left who are hand in glove with the Congress. Moreover, the era of intolerance seems to have ended suddenly after the Bihar elections. In the least, nobody is now returning awards. People returned awards individually so that their names appeared in the newspapers. It is as though a great tolerance has spread across the country after the Bihar elections, he said.
Mr. Akbar said he had a problem with the word ‘tolerance.’ To him, it reeked of patronage and favour. India’s civilisation is older than her politics and higher than secularism.
