NEW DELHI: “I am proud to say, no Hindu can ever be a terrorist,” Union home minister Amit Shah declared in Rajya Sabha on Wednesday, hitting out at Congress for manufacturing the thesis of “saffron terror” to malign majority community as part of its politics of appeasement.“They tried to give terrorism a religious colour for the sake of votes – but people of India rejected that falsehood,” he said. Shah recalled the effort in some quarters to blame Hindutva outfits for the 26/11 terror attacks that Lashkar-e-Taiba carried out in Mumbai, and said Congress neta Digvijaya Singh was among those who fanned it. tnn‘Afzal Guru couldn’t be hanged as long as PC was home mantri’ Home minister Amit Shah recalled the effort in some quarters to blame Hindutva outfits for the 26/11 terror attacks that Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) carried out. “All this was done for political gain. Innocent people were jailed, tortured and defamed – not in pursuit of justice but to build a story that served electoral purposes,” Shah said, without naming names.Significantly, his attack came on the eve of a court judgment in the Malegaon terror blasts case – the first case allegedly involving members of Abhinav Bharat, supposedly an extremist Hindutva outfit.On Tuesday, PM Narendra Modi in Lok Sabha had also attacked Congress for talking on Hindutva terror even as “Pakistan-backed terror organisations like the LeT were carrying out bomb attacks in different parts” during its regimes. In a leaked diplomatic cable, a neta can be heard saying that he was more concerned about “Hindu terror”, Modi had said, in what was seen as a reference to the Wikileaks disclosure of a purported conversation between a US diplomat and Rahul Gandhi, then a Congress MP.Participating in the special discussion on Operation Sindoor and Operation Mahadev, Shah accused Congress of enabling terrorism through decades of “appeasement politics” and weakening India’s internal security. “The only reason terrorism spread in this country was because of your (Congress) vote-bank calculations,” he said. He also said death sentence for Afzal Guru, who was convicted for the terror attack on Parliament, could not be carried out for long as P Chidambaram was home minister.On J&K, Shah said terrorism was now at its lowest point. “There was a time when Pakistan didn’t even need to send terrorists. Our own youth were being radicalised. But in the last six months, not a single Kashmiri youth has picked up a gun. All those being eliminated now are Pakistanis,” he said. “In the last six months, terrorist groups have not been able to enlist a single local youth,” said Shah, who emphasised that the last elections in J&K were the fairest the it has seen.“Elections in J&K were routinely rigged. One senior security officer told me that his main job during the polls was not to ensure safety but to stuff ballots,” he said, adding that faith in the fairness has led to a huge turnaround in sentiment. “There was not a single village where processions were not taken out against the killings of tourists at Pahalgam,” he said. On Pakistan, he reiterated, “There will be no dialogue until terrorism ends. We stopped only after they pleaded for a ceasefire – when they were on their knees.”
