At the risk of mirroring the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Congress government in Madhya Pradesh invoked the National Security Act against three men accused of cow slaughter near Moghat village in Khandwa, on Wednesday, 6 February.
According to a report in Hindustan Times, this is the first incident in Madhya Pradesh where NSA is being invoked against those accused of cow slaughter, since December last year when the Congress won the state elections.
Twitterati was extremely disappointed in CM Kamal Nath and the Congress and accused them of acting just like their rivals.
There was quite a bit of outrage too. How is cow slaughter a matter of national security was one of the popular questions on Twitter.
Isn’t lynching in the name of cow more threatening to the security of the country? Others asked.
The move seems to have upset Congress supporters too. Congress party member Salman Anees Soz tweeted a picture of a newspaper clipping that showed two news items on the same page. One headline talked about UP dropping cases against Muzaffarnagar riots accused and the adjacent one was about NSA being invoked against three people in Madhya Pradesh. He called both the events “dispiriting.”
Many others echoed his thought.
Some said the Congress is the original champion of soft Hindutva and that this move just drives that point home.
Some critics alleged that Congress doesn’t trust themselves to set a narrative, so they are going with the popular narrative.
Then there were some ‘Nath’ jokes, that explained both Yogi and Kamal (Nath) are not all that different.
Going by the reactions, it looks like the Congress needs to strive harder to be “different.” The same mistakes of their political rivals shall not be tolerated, Twitterati seem to be saying.
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