NEW DELHI, 6 April 2007 — India’s opposition Hindu party apologized for and withdrew a set of CDs yesterday that denigrated the country’s Muslim minority.
The release of the CDs by the Bharatiya Janata Party two days ago triggered a political backlash against the party as it gears up for voting in the northern Uttar Pradesh state legislature elections beginning tomorrow. “We have committed a mistake. Its circulation has been stopped with immediate effect,” Lalji Tandon, a senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader, told The Associated Press from Lucknow, the state capital.
The Indian Express newspaper reported yesterday that the CDs questioned the integrity of Muslims and said that their loyalties were with India’s longtime rival, Muslim-dominated Pakistan, and alleged that teachers at madrasas (Islamic religious schools) in India preached hatred toward the majority Hindus.
Voting for the Uttar Pradesh state legislature will end May 11.
Muslims comprise nearly 16 percent of the state’s 180 million people.
Yesterday, Allahabad High Court Justice S.N. Srivastava ruled that Muslims could not be considered a religious minority in Uttar Pradesh because of the size of their population, the Press Trust of India news agency said.
The ruling means Muslims could lose government funding for their religious schools and allocations of jobs for minorities in the state government.
Hindu-Muslim clashes have often flared up in the Uttar Pradesh state. In 1992, thousands of Hindu fanatics tore down the 16th Century Babri Mosque in the town of Ayodhya, using spades, crowbars and their bare hands, replacing it with a makeshift Hindu temple. That sparked Hindu-Muslim clashes throughout India.
BJP’s Tandon said he had released the CDs on Tuesday without first seeing their contents.
Ram Saran Das, a spokesman for the governing Samajwadi (socialist) Party, accused the BJP of stoking Hindu-Muslim tensions to win Hindu votes in the elections.
Vishwanath Pratap Singh, a former prime minister, urged India’s independent Election Commission to stop the BJP from contesting the elections. “The party is spreading poison,” Singh told reporters.
