MUMBAI, 12 August 2007 — The working president of the militant Hindu Shiv Sena party and son of Sena chief, Uddhav Thackeray on Friday warned the Congress-led Democratic Front (DF) government in Maharashtra of serious consequences if it decides to implement the Srikrishna Commission report on the 1993 communal riots.
“The Sena activists would come on the streets if the state government implements the Srikrishna Commission recommendations only to settle scores. Now the Congress is enacting a drama after Muslims have been found guilty in the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts,” Uddhav said and asked as to how Congress party President Sonia Gandhi had awakened from her deep slumber after so many years?
Uddhav attacked the Congress while addressing a meeting of BEST workers in the Matunga suburb.
He also strongly criticized the state government for its stand on implementing the Srikrishna Commission report. He said that had the Shiv Sena not been during the time of the 1993 communal riots, then Bombay would have been destroyed by a fire set ablaze by the Muslims.
“Congress party has tremendous sympathy for the accused of the serial Mumbai bomb blasts. What is their policy toward the Hindu victims that died in the blasts? Mostly Muslims were arrested in the blasts case, so what can we do about that?” Thackeray asked.
On the other side the estranged alliance partner of the Sena, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesman Prakash Javdekar was speaking in another tone on the subject and said that the serial blasts cannot be compared with the communal riots that followed the blasts.
Speaking to journalists at the state BJP office on Thursday, Javdekar lashed out at the Congress, social activists and nongovernment organizations (NGOs) for drawing comparisons between the Terrorists and Disruptive Activities (TADA) Act verdicts in the serial blasts and the communal riots probed by the Srikrishna Commission and regretted attempts to justify the serial blasts as a fallout of the riots.
Javdekar in a diplomatic and shrewd statement said, “The BJP is in favor of action being taken against all those accused in the communal riots. My party under no circumstances is justifying the communal riots. But I want to know as to why the Congress-led DF government failed to take action on the findings of the Srikrishna Commission report during its last eight years of rule.”
“The Congress has woken up suddenly out of political love only after some Congress leaders and social activists raised the issue of the Srikrishna Commission report after verdicts were pronounced in the blasts case,” Javdekar said and added that the then Sena-BJP saffron alliance government had acted on some of the commission recommendations.
Taking pot shots at the DF government, Javdekar pointed out that the Congress and its alliance partner Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) while grabbing power for the first time in 1999, had in its manifesto assured implementation of the Srikrishna Commission report, but during the eight years of its rule the promises made in their manifesto remained only confined on paper and no action was taken in reality, he concluded.
