By Anand Mishra
Ratcheting up hardline Hindutva messaging ahead of UP polls, Vishwa Hindu Parishad on Sunday urged the central government to make a national law to “prevent love jihad and illegal conversions” on the line of Uttar Pradesh’s Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act.
“Vishwa Hindu Parishad congratulates the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Yogi Adityanath ji for enacting an anti-conversion law. This web of conversion and love jihad has spread all over India, it is dangerous for the civilised society and the nation. It has come to notice that a conspiracy of conversion was caught by the Loni police of Ghaziabad district of Uttar Pradesh and on going to the bottom of that topic, it was learned that this conspiracy is not with a few families but is spread in more than 25 states across the country,” the VHP alleged in a press statement.
Addressing a press conference in Meerut, VHP’s Joint General Secretary Surendra Jain said the VHP has decided that “now there will be no harassment of any Hindu family in the province” and that through Jan Jagran (public awareness), the “potential sense (samarthya bhav) of Hindu society will be awakened so that no Hindu family should migrate in future.”
In UP, it said that 70 sensitive places have been identified where the people of Hindu society will be “fully enabled for self-defence”.
Jain hit out at “the secular forces of India”, accusing them of “participating in this anti-national act of conversion”.
“That is why the Congress did not allow the anti-conversion bill to be passed in Chhattisgarh,” he said.
UP, where Assembly polls are scheduled by March 2021, had passed the anti-conversion law in November last year and so far, nearly 80 persons have been arrested in about two dozen cases filed under the law.
This story first appeared on deccanherald.com