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New Delhi: The RSS’s Muslim wing on Sunday, January 23, held meetings with Muslim clerics and scholars to garner the community’s support for Bharatiya Janata Party ahead of the Uttar Pradesh assembly polls and said that it has learned that the consensus among Muslims on the ground is that the remarks made at the Haridwar ‘Dharma Sansad’ were “not right for any civilised society.”
Aa 10-member team of the Muslim Rashtriya Manch (MRM) in Amroha, Moradabad and Rampur districts of Uttar Pradesh participated in this election campaign, the RSS affiliate said in a statement.
The MRM team comprised its national convenor Md Akhtar, head of the outfit’s Madrasa cell Mazahar Khan and Uttarakhand Madrasa Board chairman Bilal Ur Rehman, it added.
“In all the three districts, we had long and intense discussions with the maulana of Jama Masjid, Qazi and Muslim intellectuals like doctors, lawyers, and engineers on the problems that the members of the community are facing and their solution,” MRM’s national convenor and media in-charge Shahid Sayeed told PTI.
During the meetings, the MRM said in a statement, members of the Muslim community raised concerns over growing animosity in the society, referring to the remarks made by participants at the ‘Dharma Sansad’ in Uttarakhand’s Haridwar recently.
The Haridwar Dharma Sansad, organised by militant Hindutva leader Yati Narsinghanand, saw open calls for a Muslim genocide.
“They felt that the kind of statements made at the Dharma Sansad was not right for any civilised society,” the MRM said.
Akhtar attempted to stress that “neither the government nor the Sangh had anything to do with any ‘Dharma Sansad'” and also told them that the “MRM does not support such people and it strongly condemns their remarks.”
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As The Wire has reported, on December 23, the Uttarakhand police registered a first information report against Wasim Rizvi, who was the former chairman of the Uttar Pradesh Central Shia Waqf Board, and two others under Section 153A of the IPC (promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion) related to the statements made at the event.
Ten days later on January 2, a second FIR was filed in the case which named ten persons in connection with the Dharma Sansad. They were the event organisers: Yati Narasinghanand Giri, Rizvi, Sindhu Sagar, Dharamdas, Parmananda, Sadhvi Annapurna, Anand Swaroop, Ashwini Upadhyay, Suresh Chahwan and Prabodhanand Giri.
Rizvi and Narsinghanand are both in police custody now.
The RSS’s Muslim wing recently released a ‘Nivedan Patra’ (letter of request) and appealed to Muslims to vote for the BJP in the upcoming assembly polls in five states, including Uttar Pradesh, saying Muslims are “most secure and happy” under the BJP rule.
(With PTI inputs)