Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi,a Hindu hardliner, on Saturday sought to reassure India’s large Muslim minority that he would respect their traditions if, as widely predicted, he is elected India’s prime minister, after 14 people died in the worst violence yet since the start of the country’s marathon election.
Modi’s statements in a rare television interview came as Indian police confirmed that Maoist rebels in insurgency-hit central India killed 14 people, most of them involved in helping stage the polls.
Protecting India’s Hindu-majority secular status has surfaced as a key election issue, with critics worrying that Modi’s Hindu nationalist rhetoric could stoke religious tensions in a country where 13 percent of the 1.2 billion population are Muslim.
In excerpts of the interview on India TV’s Web site, the candidate of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, said he refused to don a skullcap presented to him by a Muslim cleric three years ago, because he did not want “to hoodwink people.”
“I believe in respecting traditions of all religions, but at the same time, I have to respect my own tradition as well, although I respect all traditions. I can’t hoodwink people by wearing such skullcaps,” Modi said. “But I believe in taking action against those who show disrespect to other’s caps.”
Modi, under whose leadership Gujarat has thrived economically, paints himself as a pro-business reformist who alone can revive the economy of the world’s largest democracy.
Opinion polls favor the Bharatiya Janata Party to win the elections, ousting the scandal-tainted India National Congress party after a decade of rule.
Yet Modi remains a divisive figure after being accused of failing to swiftly curb Hindu-Muslim riots in 2002 in Gujarat, in which at least 1,000 people died. He has repeatedly rejected opponents’ accusations of wrongdoing and investigations have never found grounds to charge him.
In his interview, Modi told the TV station he favored upward mobility for Muslims, who official figures show are generally poorer, more illiterate, have less access to education and are less represented in public sector jobs than their Hindu peers.
He suggested that Muslims should enjoy the fruits of India’s economic progress, saying: “I believe their children should get better education. They should have a Koran in one hand and a computer in the other hand.”
Amid the political jostling, two landmine blasts left 14 dead in impoverished Chhattisgarh State, marking the deadliest violence since polling began on Monday last week and highlighting security issues around the election.
Seven polling officials died when Maoists blew up their bus, senior Indian police officer Gurjinder Pal Singh told reporters.
Five security men carrying out an election safety sweep who hitched a ride in an ambulance were killed in another attack, which also killed the ambulance driver and a paramedic.
“The Maoists triggered the landmine blasts,” said Singh, a key Indian official in ensuring election security in the state, which is a hotbed of Maoist activity.
The blasts came on a day when Indians cast their ballots in Goa State and in the troubled northeast in the latest round of the multi-phase elections that wind up on May 12, the results of which are due four days later.
Maoist and separatist insurgencies occupy large swathes of India’s northeast, northwest and central regions.
The vote is being held in stages to allow Indian security forces to move around the country to protect voters.
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
Prime ministers, presidents and royalty on Saturday descended on Cairo to attend the spectacle-laden inauguration of a sprawling new museum built near the pyramids to house one of the world’s richest collections of antiquities. The inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum, or GEM, marks the end of a two-decade construction effort hampered by the Arab Spring uprisings, the COVID-19 pandemic and wars in neighboring countries. “We’ve all dreamed of this project and whether it would really come true,” Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly told a news conference, calling the museum a “gift from Egypt to the whole world from a
RSS