When the 2011 Thomson Reuters Foundation survey, during the UPA regime, hailed India as the fourth most dangerous country for women, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had expressed widespread shock and shame.
On Tuesday, 26 June, when the same survey found India ranked as the world’s most dangerous country for women, the BJP decried the survey, terming it an ‘agenda’.
BJP’s head of IT Cell, Amit Malviya, in a tweet, claimed that the survey was backed by ‘agenda’, while also questioning Congress President Rahul Gandhi’s intent in “belittling India”.
Incidentally, in 2013, Malviya had said that the survey, in which India had ranked fourth, was a matter of shame for the government.
BJP MP Rajeev Chandrasekhar, too, lashed out at Gandhi for endorsing the survey.
However, in 2014, citing the earlier survey, Chandrasekhar had said that India’s ranking was a cause of alarm.
Political commentator Sunanda Vashisht, attacking Rahul Gandhi, said that the “country was bigger than your politics”. Terming the survey “mischievous and flawed”, she tweeted:
In 2011, after the survey findings were released, Vashisht had taken to Twitter to call the results ‘shameful’.
Twitter influencer and BJP sympathiser Rishi Bagree, too, rejected the survey’s findings, claiming that the experts who had been contacted for the story were “funded from abroad”.
Interestingly, in 2014, a month before the general elections, Bagree had tweeted the 2011 survey findings while taking a dig at Rahul Gandhi for talking about women empowerment.
In 2013, narendramodi.in, the Prime Minister’s official app and website, had questioned the safety of women on Twitter, citing the results of the survey.
However, after the 2018 survey, there has been no such tweet from this Twitter handle. Further, on Wednesday, the Ministry of Women and Child Development had rejected the survey findings, claiming that they were not contacted for official data.
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