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Thursday, Jun 19, 2008
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Everyone must respect the law: BJP

Neena Vyas

NEW DELHI: No one should take the law into his own hands, the Bharatiya Janata Party said on Wednesday reacting to comments in the Shiv Sena mouthpiece Saamna demanding that “Hindu suicide squads” be readied and encouraged to counter Islamic terrorist groups. The BJP differentiated its position from that of its ally.

The controversial comments were made by Sena chief Bal Thackeray in an editorial. While he disapproved of a recent bombing incident near a theatre in Mumbai, in which a Hindu organisation was allegedly involved, Mr. Thackeray suggested that Hindu organisations should, instead, prepare suicide squads to target localities where “Islamic terrorists” lived in and found shelter.

Asked for his party’s views, BJP leader M. Venkaiah Naidu said here, “People cannot be allowed to take the law into their [own] hands” and “everyone must respect the law.”

Other party leaders, however, were wary of crossing swords with the BJP’s oldest ally and its leader, Mr. Thackeray.

BJP spokesman Prakash Javadekar said he did not want to add anything to what Mr. Naidu had already said. “That is the party position.” Possibly, the Sena leader was misunderstood, he said. Mr. Thackeray “was criticising the placing of bombs near a theatre by an organisation calling itself Sanatan Dharma.”

Senior BJP leader in Maharashtra Gopinath Munde, contacted on the phone, said: “I do not wish to say anything.”

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