BJP national president J P Nadda on Saturday joined a long list of his party leaders who had been trying to polarise the forthcoming Assembly polls in Uttar Pradesh along religious lines.
"We have ganna and they (rivals) have Jinnah... ganna will win", Nadda said while addressing a meeting of party workers at Meerut. Before the BJP president, UP deputy chief minister Kehsav Prasad Maurya had referred to Samajwadi Party (SP) president Akhilesh Yadav as "Akhilesh Ali Jinnah".
UP BJP president Swatantra Deo Singh had also likened Akhilesh Yadav's regime to the rules of Mahmud of Ghazni, who had plundered India in the 10th century, and Muhammad Ghori, who laid the foundation of the Muslim rule in India in the 12th century.
"Like Ghazni and Ghori, these people (Akhilesh) have also looted the state and attacked our religious identity... the Hindus had to plead with the officials to allow them to make a pandal for Durga Puja," Singh said.
The BJP leader had also called Akhilesh a "seasonal Hindu".
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UP minister Dinesh Khatik, who was also present at the meeting, perhaps taking a cue from his party chief, went a step further saying that India should be declared a Hindu Rashtra. He also said that during the previous governments, even the prime ministers bowed before the graveyards and 'mazars' (graves of Muslims).
"Today we have a prime minister, who is requested to build temples even in Arab nations,'' Khatik said.
BJP leaders have also been raking up the issues of "conversion, cow slaughter, migration of Hindu families" in their rallies and seeking to remind the Hindus about their alleged 'humiliation' and attack on their culture during the regimes of the Samajwadi Party (SP) and others.
The opposition leaders have slammed the BJP for trying to polarise the polls along communal lines and said that it appears that the saffron party has already accepted defeat.
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