🛑Stop the polarisation please | 👮'Kasab did not kill Hemant Karkare,' says Congress

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Parties polarise voters ahead of Phase 3

94 constituencies across 12 states and Union Territories are scheduled to vote on 7th May. BJP has already won Surat in Gujarat unopposed, and the poll for the Anantnag-Rajouri seat in Jammu and Kashmir has been deferred to May 25.

Why the third phase is crucial: With the completion of the third phase, over 280 constituencies will have gone to polls, meaning that more than half of the total seats in Lok Sabha will have been decided. 

But what were they campaigning about? Leading up to Phase 3, wealth redistribution and inheritance tax proposals were in the focus. Shoddy clarifications by the Congress on the issue and Rahul Gandhi’s repeated assertions on re-distributing wealth did not help the Congress. This was Rahul Gandhi two days ago…

Polarisation takes centre stage: Not just that, parties are increasingly looking to polarise the vote banks and BJP is facing flak for releasing two ads which depict the Muslim community disgracefully. In the videos, it is seen as Congress helping the Muslim community with funds and the Muslim community is then shown taking over SC/ST people.

The Congress party filed an FIR against BJP leaders including BJP President J P Nadda and the party's IT cell chief Amit Malviya. It complained with the Election Commission, alleging that the video aims to intimidate SC/ST communities from voting for Congress.

On the other hand, the Congress party is hinging and putting its entire focus on reservations and minorities. Today at a rally in Madhya Pradesh, Rahul Gandhi claimed that the 50% cap on reservations would be removed and revised.

In another video, Rahul Gandhi is seen pushing India’s version of ‘critical race theory’. He claims that minorities find it harder to crack entrance exams because the entrance exams are set by upper-caste people. To buttress his claim, he uses an apparent study in the United States which found that African Americans and Latinos find it harder to get top SAT scores because the paper is set by White people. This fear-mongering and creating a sense of insecurity can be seen as a dangerous socialist move.

Rahul Gandhi is incorrect on multiple levels because usually Asians top SATs along with White people. In Indian universities, there’s already a reservation and quota for minorities which is heavily debated even today.

Clip du jour

Kolkata police is asking people to ‘identify themselves’ on Twitter for sharing a meme (😑). And in another example of the Streisand Effect, the meme is being widely shared

'Kasab did not kill Hemant Karkare,' says Congress

Shashi Tharoor has called for a probe into claims that Hemant Karkare was not killed by Ajmal Kasab during the 26/11 attacks.

The context: Yesterday, Congress leader Vijay Wadettiwar claimed that Karkare was killed by a police officer associated with the RSS. Later, Wadettiwar clarified that his controversial statement was based on claims made in a book by SM Mushrif, a former Inspector General of Police in Maharashtra.

What exactly does the book by SM Mushrif say? Mushrif has repeatedly called for an investigation into the killing of Karkare in the CST-Cama-Rangabhavan lane but maintained that there is no clean chit to the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). The book makes a sensational claim that the Intelligence Bureau allegedly conspired with right-wing groups to withhold information from the Mumbai police which placed Karkare in a vulnerable position to get shot.

• Soon a plea was filed claiming that Karkare was killed for exposing right-wing terror plots in India and was inches away from a breakthrough before his death.

The intrigue: In December 2008, Union Minority Affairs Minister A R Antulay suggested that Karkare could have been killed due to his investigation of the 2008 Malegaon case and the Sanatan Sanstha arms cases.

Why these two cases? This was the same time when the Congress government was pushing forward the unsubstantiated theory that ‘Hindu radicalisation is much more dangerous to India than Pakistan terror groups’ and these two cases were at the forefront of making this narrative. Rahul Gandhi raised this issue at a diplomatic level with the United States in 2010.

But…It is still a mystery why Congress leaders are raising questions now when the entire probe around the terror attacks took place under the Congress-led UPA government and terrorist Ajmal Kasab was hanged in 2012.

BJP reacts: The BJP has filed a complaint against Wadettiwar and Congress, alleging the spreading of lies and defamation. Ujjwal Nikam has refuted the claims as “baseless” and an insult to the martyrs of the 26/11 attacks, citing that even Pakistan acknowledged Kasab's role.

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