Killings of tailor in Raj, chemist in Maha: BJP playing vote polarisation game, says Cong MLA

Maharashtra Congress leader and former state minister Yashomati Thakur on Monday attacked the Bharatiya Janata Party over the recent killings of a tailor in Udaipur in Rajasthan and a chemist here.

Tailor Kanhaiya Lal was killed on June 28 in the north-western state, while chemist Umesh Kolhe was murdered a week earlier on June 21.

Police probe in the two states has revealed the murders were linked to social media messages of the victims in support of Nupur Sharma, who was suspended from the BJP for objectionable comments against Prophet Mohammad.

“The BJP is playing the game of vote polarisation. We will not let the BJP carry out this experiment in Amravati. The party is directly or indirectly involved in such violent incidents in the country,” Thakur alleged at a press conference here.

Mohammad Riyaz Attari, an accused in the Kanhaiya Lal murder case is reportedly a BJP member, while the main accused in the Kolhe case campaigned for Amravati Lok Sabha MP Navneet Rana in the 2019 polls, she alleged.

The BJP as well as Rana have routinely denied these allegations.

She alleged a man identified as Tariq Ahmed Mir arrested for supplying weapons to terrorists in J-K in 2020 was a BJP functionary.

“In the name of nationalism, the BJP has hatched a conspiracy to hollow out the country,” Thakur, an MLA from Teosa here, said.

Maharashtra Congress spokesperson Dilip Yedatkar and former minister Sunil Deshmukh, who took part in the press conference, also attacked the BJP over recent communal incidents.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Federal staff and is auto-published from a syndicated feed.)