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Newsmen raise hackles of ABVP officials over earlier report

Verbal duels and heated exchanges reigned at a press conference organised in Madras by the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad to highlight the findings of an ABVP team which had toured Tamil Nadu last week to collect details about the activities of Islamic fundamentalist groups.

When ABVP general secretary Mahendra Kumar and former general secretary V Muralidharan alleged that some politicians belonging to the ruling DMK had links with these groups which had indulged in terrorism, newspersons wanted them to react to the allegation made by the Bharatiya Janata Party's fact-finding team which had toured the state in 1995 that stated these groups had links with some leaders in the then ruling All India Anna DMK.

This led to heated exchanges between the ABVP leaders and newspersons, with Mahendra Kumar denying that the ABVP might be indulging in selective fact-finding according to a political agenda. The ABVP was only a social, and not a political organisation, he asserted.

This prompted a question from some newspersons whether the ABVP would demand the arrest of those responsible for the murder of 14 innocent Muslims during the November-December riots in Coimbatore as it had done in the case of the murders of Hindu Munnani cadres.

With the focus of the press conference shifting to the Coimbatore blasts, the ABVP leaders countered the state government's version in the white paper that the fundamentalist groups resorted to blasts after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992.

This prompted the newspersons to say that the period prior to the demolition had witnessed mainly murders of the cadres of fundamentalist groups and communal riots and not serial blasts. Serial blasts of March 1993 in Bombay constituted the first major incident of its kind in the country, they pointed out.

At this stage, some newspersons wanted to know whether the ABVP had any relevant statistics about communal flare-ups in Maharashtra where the BJP-Shiv Sena was in power, to which the ABVP leaders retorted angrily: "You want what happened there to happen here also."

The ABVP leaders wanted to know why the newspersons were intent on singling out one event. There had been many attacks of Hindu religious processions in Tamil Nadu even in the fifties, they contended.

The ABVP leaders repeated their stand that the bomb blasts were a consequence of pan-Islamic terrorism instigated by certain international forces.

UNI

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