BJP youth wing workers vandalise Shashi Tharoor’s Thiruvananthapuram office
The Bhartiya Yuva Morcha vandals poured black oil at the entrance of the office and put up a black flag and a board reading ‘Tharoor’s Pakistan office’ after destroying the original signboard, said police.
A group of Bhartiya Yuva Morcha activists vandalised Congress MP Shashi Tharoor’s office in the state capital on Monday afternoon protesting his recent ‘Hindu Pakistan’ remarks. They poured black oil at the entrance of the office and put up a black flag and a board reading ‘Tharoor’s Pakistan office’ after destroying the original signboard, police said.
Neither Tharoor who is currently in Thiruvananthapuram, nor anyone else was at the office when the attack took place. The protestors fled the scene when the police reached the spot. Police have registered a case against a group of unidentified persons.
Tharoor took to Twitter to say that the vandalism and violence was a warning by the BJP.
While the Congress condemned the attack, the BJP has justified it.
“It is a dastardly attack. It exposed the real face of the BJP,” said state opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala. Even as the Congress national leadership distanced itself from Tharoor’s ‘Hindu Pakistan’ jibe, the party’s Kerala unit stood behind him. The author-politician had said recently that Indian will become a ‘Hindu Pakistan’ if the BJP returned to power in 2019 general election.
BJP Thiruvananthapuram district president S Suresh said the Yuva Morcha workers’ action was a democratic way of protest. “Workers have every right to vent their anger if they are provoked with such irresponsible statements,” he said.
Though the BJP had sought an apology from him Tharoor stood his ground saying there was nothing wrong in his statement. “A state with a dominant majority religion that seeks to put its minorities in a subordinate place will be a Hindu Pakistan,” he reiterated.
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