Panaji: “Incidents like the lynching in Dadri, near the national capital last month, will actually damage the BJP and the NDA,” Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar said, even as he gave a clean chit to the RSS vis-a-vis rising incidents of communal violence.
Parrikar who was speaking during a public interaction event near here yesterday also said that some of the incidents were being ‘blown out of proportion’ by vested political interests.”I think these incidents would actually damage the BJP or the NDA. It also damages the cause or the vision that the Prime Minister has and therefore they cannot be in the interest of the BJP or the NDA or the country,” Parrikar mentioned in response to a question about the Dadri episode at the event.
Without mentioning any specific incident, Parrikar, a Rajya Sabha MP from Uttar Pradesh, said that sometimes such flare-ups were blown out of proportion.
“Sometimes they are being blown out of proportion. I am not referring to any specific instance but I found that issues which are local in nature, they are being given national coverage maybe because some politician wants to make it a national issue,” the Defence Minister said.
When asked about reports allegedly linking the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh to communal incidents, Parrikar gave the Hindu right-wing organisation a clean chit and said that he was a ‘hardcore RSS person’.
“I am a hardcore RSS person from childhood, I can assure you that this has nothing to do with RSS,” Parrikar stated, adding that violence in any form by any one cannot be accepted and that the both he and the Sangh believed in similar principles.
