New Delhi: The Congress on Thursday said it would approach the Election Commission of India over the Tripura violence issue saying there was no place for the “might is right” practice in a democracy. “Why is the ECI silent over the violence, which happened on a day the poll panel announced election dates in the state? Our local team is meeting the state EC. We have also sought time from the EC in New Delhi and will meet them in a day or two,” Congress media head Pawan Khera said.
“Our leaders Ajoy Kumar and Tzarita Laitphlang have been exposing the state government. When they failed to silence the voices of our leaders, they attacked them. It is a matter of concern that such violence took place on the day polls were announced. The attack on our leader is a message to the voters that might be right. But we will not let that happen. We will raise our voice outside and inside Parliament also,” he added.
The Congress response came after AICC in-charge of Tripura Ajoy Kumar was attacked in the Majlishpur district of the state on Wednesday during a bike rally. Party president Mallikarjun Kharge and other senior functionaries condemned the attack, saying it proved that law and order had collapsed in the state.
“Law and order collapsed in the state. It is high time the EC ensures a free and fair poll and acts against the BJP. It is highly reprehensible that a Tripura BJP minister has used violence and physical assault against Ajoy Kumar,” Kharge said. The culture of political violence is not new in Tripura and the Congress has been raising the issue of attacks on its senior leaders and workers in the past. Around 19 persons, including state unit chief Birajit Sinha and senior leader Sudip Roy Burman, were injured in clashes between Congress and BJP workers in front of the party office in June last year. Both Congress and the BJP blamed each other for the attacks.
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In August, Burman suffered head injuries during the local yatra in Agartala in a second such attack in which several other leaders and supporters were also injured. Burman had left the BJP to join the Congress. The Congress again blamed the BJP for the incident saying the attack happened when their leaders were under police detention while the BJP denied the charge. The Congress has been trying hard to revive the party in Tripura where the BJP-led alliance came to power in 2018 after defeating the Left Front.
Congress also demanded the withdrawal of the new draft IT rules to curb fake news inquiring if the government would start fact-checking online news, and who would fact-check the government. “The Congress strongly condemned this surreptitious assault on free speech and vile censorship. We demand that the new amendment in the Draft IT Rules is immediately withdrawn and that these rules be discussed threadbare in the forthcoming session of Parliament,” said Khera.
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The fact-checking unit of the Press Information Bureau has remained a habitual offender in converting ‘Truth’ to ‘Fakery’, to save the government’s image, the Congress media head alleged as he cited some cases to support the charge. “On November 13, 2022, the PIB posted a false tweet calling out Rahul Gandhi’s video asking simple questions about whether ‘railways is being privatised’ and marked it as ‘fake’.
In the attached video of the ongoing Bharat Jodo Yatra, Rahul Gandhi was being told by a member of the South Central Railway Employees’ Sangh, Bharani Bhanu Prasad, “railway stations, workshops, medical centres and establishments will be privatised”. This was in reply to Gandhi’s enquiry about “which part of Indian Railways is being privatised?”. The PIB converted a free-wheeling discussion about an important issue concerning the common people and railway workers as “FAKE NEWS”. Tomorrow, if these IT Rules are applied, this tweet by a leader of the principal opposition party will be taken down, thus resulting in destroying Democracy,” said Khera.
