A day after a central government’s minister said that Madhya Pradesh’s extra-judicial killings will lift India’s morale, another minister in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet has made a controversial statement.
Declaring the undertrials terrorists, Union Minister Kiren Rijiju implied on Tuesday that it was wrong for ordinary citizens to raise doubts and question the police on the brutal murder of eight undertrials in Bhopal.
The minister even invoked the tension with Pakistan to justify his claims, which will strengthen the perceived notion about Modi government’s hidden agenda to extract electoral mileage ahead of next year’s crucial assembly polls.
Rijiju, according to PTI, said that facts will come out soon and decried the “habit” of raising doubts and questioning the authorities and police in such incidents.
“It is not good to raise questions on security forces dealing with terrorists, just on the basis of videos. We are facing challenges in border with ceasefire violation. Our forces are responding,” he told reporters in Delhi.
The Minister of State for Home Affairs was queried on the circumstances in which the eight alleged SIMI members were killed yesterday near Bhopal by police.
The eight SIMI activists were killed in what appeared to be a fake encounter with police on the outskirts of Bhopal hours after they escaped from the high-security Central jail there killing a security guard.
As a controversy raged over the police action after the daring pre-dawn jail-break, TV channels showed footage purportedly from the encounter site in which a policeman is seen pumping bullets into a man from close range after some unidentified person takes out what appears to be a knife said to be in a plastic cover and places it back.