Anti-BJP slogans:Undeclared emergency in country, Cong

Congress on Tuesday claimed that there was an undeclared emergency in the country as Tamil Nadu BJP chief forced the arrest of a teenager for raising slogans against the Modi government in an aircraft.

“What happened in Tamil Nadu on Monday on that flight from Chennai to Tuticorin was not only an assault on the freedom of speech and expression but an assault on our fundamental rights... it was fascism playing itself out in its fullest glory,” Congress spokesman Manish Tewari told reporters here.

Tewari said the Tamil Nadu incident followed close on the heels of the arrest of activists by the Pune Police for their alleged links wit Maoists. He welcomed the Bombay High Court, upbraiding the police for “attempting to taint public opinion” regarding the activists.

“If this is not an undeclared emergency, then how else would you characterise this situation,” the Congress leader wondered.

Tewari claimed this pattern has been playing itself out repeatedly and systematically since 2014 when the BJP-NDA government came to power.

He said this pattern started with “assault” on students of Film institute in Pune, and went on with incidents like the unfortunate suicide of Rohith Vemula, derecognition of Periyar Study Circle in IIT-Madras and “vilification campaign” of Jawaharlal Nehru University.

There is a narrative which the NDA-BJP government has been consistently trying to peddle, which says there will be only one voice in this country and that would be of the BJP-RSS, Tewari said.

“If anybody else speaks, he will be thrown into jail. If you question the BJP, you are an anti-national. If you question the government, you are a traitor. If you question the establishment, you are downright seditious,” the former union minister said.