Chandigarh, July 13: The BJP today charged the Congress with following "double standards on secularism" and took the party to task for backing the demand for retrial of the Best Bakery carnage case outside Gujarat. The Congress party never expressed sympathies with people displaced from Kashmir and those killed in riots in the past in Delhi, Bihar, Meerut, Mumbai and Gujarat, adopting double standards on matters of secularism, BJP president M Venkaiah Naidu said.
"You (Cong) don't want us (BJP) to talk about Godhra, you want to do so on what happened in Ayodhya in 1992," Naidu said addressing the concluding session of the three-day training camp for party legislators in the northern region here.
Taking a dig at the Congress for it's demand for conducting the retrial in the Best Bakery case outside Gujarat, he asked if the Congress ever put forth such a demand in relation to incidents of terrorism in Kashmir and Punjab.
"Instead of raking up Best Bakery case, the Congress should accept that there is weakness in the criminal justice system of the country," he said, adding that "to see criminal justice system in relation to the Best Bakery case alone is the narrow vision of the Congress."
The Best Bakery case had been raked up to defame the Narendra Modi government, he said.
He said that as many as 5734 cases were registered against different people between 1985 to 1992 in Gujarat, out of which only 97 cases ended with conviction."In Mumbai 1788 people died between 1992-1993 and not even a single person was convicted and in the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi about 2733 people died but only eight persons were convicted," he said.
"In Bihar 1000 people died in 1989 riots but only 16 people were convicted and in Meerut riots 350 people died but not even a single person was convicted," he said.
Bureau Report