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Puri Shankaracharya lashes out at Vajpayee

Syed Amin Jafri in Hyderabad

The Shankaracharya of Puri, Swami Adhyakshojanandji, on Sunday lashed out at Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee for seeking to justify the communal violence in Gujarat by saying that it was triggered off by the attack in Godhra.

The Shankaracharya also questioned the right of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal to speak on behalf of Hindus and said that the Hindus of the country had not given any mandate to these organisations to speak on behalf of them.

He was addressing a Communal Harmony Convention organised by Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Hind.

He termed the carnage in Gujarat as a blot on the face of humanity. "It has not only brought down the status of the Hindu religion but the entire humanity," he said.

He held the prime minister directly responsible for the killing of hundreds of people in Gujarat violence and said that this was a crime 'without any parallel' in Indian history.

"Earlier the prime minister was saying that he had no face to show to the world and now he is talking shamelessly the language of Narendra Modi. He has shown that only RSS interest is dear to him," he said

He added, "It is high time that all the religious figures come forward to save the humanity and the country."

Professor Kamal Mitra Chenoy of Jawaharlal Nehru University, who was a member of a team that visited the violence-hit areas of Gujarat, rejected the prime minister's contention that violence in Gujarat was a reaction to the incident in Godhra.

Releasing a document Gujarat carnage 2002: A report to the nation, he said that Godhra incident was a spontaneous reaction to provocative activities of VHP and Bajrang Dal activists, but the violence that followed Godhra was pre-planned and well-organised.

"The killers went around with gas cylinders to set the houses and shops on fire. They used the voters' list to identify their Muslim targets," he said.

The report was drafted by a team comprising K S Subramaniam, former finance secretary S P Shukla and journalist Achin Vinayak.

JuH president Moulana Asad Madani called for unity among secular forces in the country to face the growing threat of communal forces. "The Sangh Parivar is the real enemy of the country," he said, and called for united efforts to build a new country on the basis of communal harmony and brotherhood.

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