New Delhi: Two days after clips showing him deliver a speech calling for Christians and Muslims to be “brought back into the Hindu fold” began to be circulated widely on social media, Bharatiya Janata Party MP Tejasvi Surya tweeted that he was “unconditionally” withdrawing the statements.
As The Wire has reported, Surya’s speech, which was streamed live and which the Bengaluru South MP delivered at a programme of the Sri Krishna Mutt in Udupi on December 25, was one hour and 20 minutes long. In it, he gives out several calls for preventing religious conversion, in Kannada and English.
A video of the full speech, uploaded to the BJP MP’s official YouTube channel, had not been deleted at the time of publishing this report.
While a section shared clips noting the communal dog-whistling latent in his words, others lauded him for the speech.
“Those who have gone out of the Hindu fold must be brought back in whole, brought back into the Hindu faith, brought back to the mother faith,” Surya is heard saying.
He also appears to say that religious houses should have “yearly targets” for the number of people they have to return to the Hindu fold. Such an effort must be taken up on war footing, he said.
“Certain statements from my speech has regrettably created an avoidable controversy (sic),” he wrote on Twitter on December 27.
Indian Express has quoted unnamed sources as having said that the MP was “told to issue the statement in light of the coming Goa elections.” In Goa, Christians form a sizeable chunk of the population.
Surya’s speech, which was peppered with how Islam and Christianity are antithetical to Hinduism, came as the anti-conversion legislation, which had seen pitched opposition from Christians, was passed by the Karnataka assembly. Hindutva outfits have also been disrupting prayers and Christmas celebrations across Karnataka recently.
This is not the first time that Surya has been blatantly communal in his speeches or public conduct, but is one of the few times when he has withdrawn his statements.
At the height of the second wave of COVID-19, 17 Muslim employees were fired from the COVID-19 war room in Bengaluru after Surya blamed them for corruption in bed allotment. The Wire had reported that it soon became clear that these employees had nothing to do with the allotment.
Last year, as The Wire had reported, his pre-parliamentary bigotry appeared to have caused the establishment so much diplomatic grief that the Indian government asked Twitter to effectively take down one of his tweets from 2015 that linked Islam with terrorists.
This story first appeared on thewire.in