National

Preserve tolerance and brotherhood: Agnivesh

NEW DELHI MARCH 2. Expressing regret over Thursday's attack on the Sabarmati Express in Godhra, "which claimed scores of lives," the working president of the Sarvadeshik Arya Pratinidhi Sabha (World Council of Arya Samaj), Agnivesh, has said "words are inadequate" to condemn the incident. Referring to the Defence Minister, George Fernandes' observation that the attack seemed to be the handiwork of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence to provoke a communal conflagration in the country, Swami Agnivesh said in a statement here today " it is a shame that we have played ourselves into the hands of the agent provocateur and degenerated so quickly into anarchy and bloodbath of unthinkable magnitude.''

Condemning the Gujarat Government's "tragic incompetence" in dealing with the violence that followed in the State, resulting "in such a heavy toll in human life and property," he said "abandoning helpless and terror-stricken people to mob fury for nearly three days cannot be condoned in any civilised society."

The background to this turn of events was the "communal stridency of the Sangh Parivar in building the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya." The Arya Samaj, he said, felt that going ahead with the programme, in defiance of the law of the land, was an "insult to Lord Ram as well as a frontal challenge to the secular fabric of our society. We call upon the proponents of the `mandir' movement to abandon this ill-conceived project and concentrate on the real issues of our society such as poverty, escalating unemployment, the desecration of our culture by consumerism and materialism and so on."

Urging the Supreme Court to take suo moto notice of the ``ugly politicisation" of the issue, Swami Agnivesh said a verdict should be delivered on the long-pending case on an urgent basis. He also called upon the Centre and the Gujarat Government to ensure that the guilty were punished.

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