The Delhi elections are only five days away. With the elections campaigns reaching a feverish pitch, Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Yogi Adityanath gave an interview to BBC. He has been campaigning in Delhi for the BJP and his remarks in his rallies have attracted a lot of attention. As expected, the Saffron-clad Mahant of Gorakhnath Muth was asked some pointed questions by the BBC on the ongoing protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and NRC.
The BBC asked Yogi Adityanath if it wasn’t true that the Muslims protesting against the CAA and NRC today are the descendants of those who had rejected moving to Pakistan in 1947, a country that was created on the basis of religion. The Chief Minister of UP responded by saying that they hadn’t done India any favour by choosing to remain in India.
Yogi Adityanath said, “They hadn’t done any favour. They hadn’t done any favour to India. When India was partitioned, it should have been opposed. Arguments in favour of India must be supported. Those which are against India must be opposed. This is what our nationalism says and it is also the duty of every Indian citizen.”
It is pertinent to mention here that Sharjeel Imam, the mastermind of the Shaheen Bagh protests who urged Muslims to cut off North East India from the rest of the country indefinitely, had said that Muslims did not choose to stay in India due to secularism or any such thing. He had said that Muslims chose to stay in India due to their property and other reasons.
The BBC has a history of dubious reporting about India. And the specific question asked to Yogi Adityanath here appears consistent with its liberal bias. For instance, it has been peddling a fake narrative about Kashmir since the 1990s. There have been numerous occasions in the past when the BBC has lied outright in order to achieve its desired political objective. There was also the time in 2018 when they blamed nationalism for the rise of fake news in India.
