Cong, other anti-BJP parties afflicted with secularitis: Rajnath Singh

Slamming its adversaries for trying to create a divide on lines of secularism and communalism in the country, the BJP today charged the Congress and its allies with suffering from "secularitis" disease.

"You know there is a disease called encephalitis which is very bad .....similarly there is another disease called secularitis from which the Congress and its allies are suffering in the manner they have been trying to create a divide on the lines of secularism and communalism in the country," the BJP national president Rajnath Singh told reporters.

"Our country must be saved from this disease (secularitis)," he said and urged all political parties to oppose it.

Noting that the Congress has been in the habit of practising political divide on communalism vs secularism every time when the elections are round the corner, the BJP national president urged the mainstream political parties to guard against falling into the traps of the Congress.

"We have further noted that the Congress attack the Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi at the time of elections and harps on 2002 riots as part of a deliberate strategy and conspiracy to malign Modi and BJP," Singh said and asked the Congress to refrain from pursuing such tactics for vote bank politics.

The Congress has been seen as consolidating the secular forces to prevent rise of communal forces, the senior BJP leader observed and described as a calculated political strategy of the Congress to divert public attention from failures of the UPA government on all fronts.

"The UPA government has also tried to mount attack on the Gujarat Chief Minister by holding himself responsible for encounters in Gujarat," Singh said referring to the ongoing CBI probe into the Ishrat Jahan encounter case as another example of diversionary tactics.

"Tell me, in which states encounters have not taken place, but no hue and cry has been made in encounter cases in different states," he said.

Similarly, as many as 13,900 riots have taken place in the country since Independence, including 1984 riots against the Sikhs following the assassination of the then prime minister Indira Gandhi, Singh said.

"But no riots have been played out in the manner that the Gujarat riots have been and no other leader crucified as Modi has been," he said and defended his earlier exhortation to people to move on by forgetting the Gujarat riots.

The BJP national president, who was visiting Bihar for the first time since the JD(U) split from NDA last week, however, refrained from going all out to slam Chief Minister Nitish Kumar for parting ways with the BJP by blaming the rise of his Gujarat counterpart as a national player.

"All I would like to tell the Bihar chief minister is to guard against falling in trap of the Congress which wants to divide the polity on communal vs secular lines," Singh said and left scope for future alignment despite Kumar's categorical 'no' to doing any business with the saffron party.

He reminded the chief minister of his duty to strengthen the anti-Congress forces to carry forward the legacies of the socialist leaders like Jai Prakash Narayan and Ram Manohar Lohia, recalling that though the disciples of these respected socialists failed to carry forward their ideology, the BJP has done so by emerging as an alternative to the Congress in national polity.