By Neelam Pandey and Manasi Phadke
New Delhi/Mumbai: Outfits with the Sangh Parivar are putting in special efforts in their campaign for the Maharashtra assembly elections, aiming to galvanise Hindus and consolidate their votes, following the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) lacklustre Lok Sabha poll performance in Maharashtra.
Members of the outfits, however, maintain they are neither campaigning for any particular party nor telling voters to vote for any one. Their only aim, they say, is ensuring that the majority vote is in favour of the Hindutva agenda.
Mohan Salekar, secretary of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) Konkan division, told ThePrint that the members are distributing pamphlets across Maharashtra in all the 288 constituencies that will poll on 20 November in a single phase.
“This is no longer a hidden fact that in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, a party got 99 seats by only indulging in vote jihad,” Salekar claimed, without naming the Congress party. “Why shouldn’t Hindus unite and vote for the candidate of a party that looks after their welfare? We have been witnessing cases of love and land jihad in Maharashtra, too, and an atmosphere of fear is being spread as the Hindu community is being targeted.”
‘Love jihad’ is a term the BJP and Sangh Parivar members use to refer to interfaith marriages or relationships started allegedly for converting Hindu girls to other religions. With ‘land jihad’, they allude to an alleged conspiracy by the Muslims to acquire land parcels and edge out Hindus.
This story was originally published in theprint.in. Read the full story here.
