By IANS,
Amritsar : The radical Sikh organization Dal Khalsa Wednesday slammed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for adopting “double standards” on terrorism.
Seeking an apology for the attacks on Muslims in recent years, the Dal Khalsa leaders flayed the BJP for trying to defend a radical Hindutva terror network exposed by investigating agencies.
“The recent arrests of Swami Dayanand Pandey, Sadhvi Pragya and serving army officer Lt. Col Purohit for plotting terror crimes targeted at Muslims have brought the ugly face of Hindutva terror to fore,” Dal Khalsa president H.S. Dhami and secretary Kanwarpal Singh said in a statement.
They said the linking of Hindutva ideology to terror strikes had opened a Pandora’s box.
They said BJP leader L.K. Advani was raising a lot of hue and cry after the terror network was exposed. “The BJP leader should be reminded that the racial profiling of Sikhs and Muslims has been practised with complete impunity over the years,” Dhami said.
“We can enumerate hundreds of screaming headlines across the country announcing the arrest of ‘Sikh terrorists’, ‘Kashmiri terrorists’, ‘Manipuri terrorists’ and the like. It’s ironic that the pleas of minorities to evolve a code of conduct to end such racial profiling went unheard and unattended,” they added.
The Dal Khalsa also virtually rejected Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s statement Tuesday that Operation Bluestar at the Golden Temple complex was a “tragedy” and that the 1984 anti-Sikh riots were “absolutely wrong”.
“We should not attach any relevance or weightage to his statement. It was the state under the Congress leadership that engineered the killings of the thousands of Sikhs in Delhi and elsewhere. Unless and until all guilty Congressmen and police as well as administrative officials are brought to book, such expressions by anyone hold no water,” the Dal Khalsa leaders said.