New Delhi: Distancing itself from senior Congress leader Sam Pitroda's "hua to hua" comment on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, the Congress party on Friday said that the victims of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and the 2002 Gujarat riots must get justice.
“Any opinion or remark made by any individual to the contrary, including Sam Pitroda’s, is not the opinion of the party,” said Congress leader Abhishek Manu Singhvi while addressing a presser.
“The Congress party believes that justice should be done to 1984 riots victims as also to 2002 Gujarat riots victims. We abhor violence of any kind, against any person or a group of people based on their caste, color, region or religion," added Singhvi.
Hitting out at the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), Singhvi accused it of using riots as a means of garnering votes in every election. He also alleged that such controversies are used to distract people from his own failures.
On Thursday, Mr. Pitroda had reacted to the BJP’s allegation that former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had been directly involved in the anti-Sikh riots following Indira Gandhi’s assassination.
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A video clip of an interview tweeted by BJP leaders showed Pitroda responding to a question about the violence with the sentence, “Hua to hua [it happened, so what?].”
The video clip was of an exchange between an ANI reporter and Pitroda on Thursday. The reporter asked Pitroda about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s claim that former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had ordered the violence in 1984 after two Sikh bodyguards assassinated his mother Indira Gandhi.
Pitroda responded: “I don’t think so, this is also another lie. You keep telling lies every day. And what is with 1984? You tell about what happened in five years [of Bharatiya Janata Party’s rule]. It happened in 1984, so what? What have you done? You were voted to create jobs, you didn’t create jobs. You were voted to create 200 smart cities, you didn’t do that either.”
Taking a dig at the saffron party for fielding Pragya Singh Thakur, an accused in the 2008 Malegaon blast case, from Bhopal Parliamentary Constituency in the ongoing Lok Sabha polls 2019, Singhvi said,“Unlike the BJP, which has decided to field a candidate charged with terror crimes and is being lauded by none other than Narendra Modi himself, the Congress party has shown the moral and political courage to punish people and leaders accused of violence in 1984."
With two more phases of the seven-phased Lok Sabha polls left to be concluded in states like Delhi, UP and Punjab, among others, which account for fairly large size of the Sikh population, Pitroda's remark has been used by the BJP to gain political mileage.
