Omar Abdullah slams BJP support for Nitish Kumar amid ‘niqab’ row
When asked about Union Minister and BJP MP Giriraj Singh supporting Nitish Kumar's action, Omar Abdullah said he expects nothing else from the party.
Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah on Thursday weighed in on the ongoing controversy over a viral video in which Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar was seen pulling a niqab (veil) off a Muslim woman's face.
When asked about Union Minister and BJP MP Giriraj Singh supporting Nitish Kumar's action, Omar Abdullah said he expects nothing else from the party. Abdullah also said that the BJP would've caused a huge uproar had he taken off a Hindu woman's ‘ghunghat’.
“If it had been a Hindu woman from Rajasthan or Haryana, wearing a veil, and I had removed it, would the BJP have said the same thing? Imagine the uproar if a Muslim leader had removed the veil of a Hindu woman. But now, because it was a Muslim woman doctor, the BJP's reaction is different. What else can we expect from them?,” Abdullah said during an interaction with the media.
The Bihar chief minister had pulled down a Muslim woman doctor's veil or ‘niqab’ when he was distributing appointment letters to AYUSH doctors in his home state. A video of the incident was widely circulated recently and drew huge flak.
However, BJP MP Giriraj Singh came out in Nitish Kumar's support later, saying he did nothing wrong. “How can anyone accept an appointment letter wearing a hijab? When you go to the airport would you say ‘I won’t remove my hijab please let me go inside'?… There's a new trend these days of linking everything to Islam...,” Giriraj Singh said during a media interaction outside the Parliament on Thursday.
Omar Abdullah strongly condemned Giriraj Singh's defence of the Bihar chief minister later, and even said that the ‘niqab’ pulling incident revealed Nitish Kumar's “real face”.
“Nowhere is it allowed (to pull down the veil of a Muslim woman). If the chief minister didn’t want to give her the order (himself) then he should have skipped her but humiliating her in front of everybody is absolutely wrong. Slowly the reality of Nitish Kumar is coming to the fore, who was earlier considered a secular and intelligent leader,” Abdullah told reporters.
The viral video had triggered huge outrage, with several religious and youth leaders of Jammu and Kashmir seeking Nitish Kumar's resignation. Among them were Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) president and J&K’s former chief minister Mehbooba Mufti, senior CPM leader MY Tarigami and Awami Ittehad Party chief spokesperson Inam Un Nabi.
(With inputs from HT correspondent)
