NEW DELHI: The real face of some people who are trying to give a communal colour to the government’s decisions to resolve problems that have lingered for decades was being exposed and coming under close scrutiny, Prime Minister
Narendra Modi said in New Delhi on Tuesday.
“The country is silent but fully understands what is happening... how lies to further vote banks have been concocted for decades. People have understood all this,” Modi said while addressing a
National Cadet Corps rally. The PM’s comments came in the context of his references to the decision to abrogate
Jammu & Kashmir’s special status and passage of the
Citizenship (Amendment) Act.
PM Modi hit out strongly against those opposed to
CAA and said that certain political parties were so obsessed with vote-bank politics that they couldn’t see even rape and kidnappings of girls belonging to minority communities in Pakistan.
“The youth of this country has decided that prob-lems will not be deferred, they will be confronted and dealt with,” Modi said in remarks seen as an outreach to his youthful audience in the backdrop of opposition parties and a section of commentators claiming that youth were driving the protests against CAA.
Referring to the decisions on J&K, Modi asked how long the ills that accompanied Partition could be allowed to linger and a death toll of victims of terrorism allowed to mount. “Sometimes, when an illness continues for very long, it becomes part of the body. Could we have allowed this situation to continue,” he asked.
He also spoke of the decision to regularise some 1,700-odd colonies in Delhi, saying it provided succour to some 40 lakh people.
Modi said that CAA was intended to correct a “historic blunder” committed at the time of Partition and cited a recent advertisement by Pakistan army in which it had sought applications for sanitation workers with a rider that only non-Muslims could apply for the job.