JALANDHAR: The distribution of an unapproved publication aboard the Bengaluru-Chennai Shatabdi Express on Friday morning has a Punjab and BJP connection. A Twitter storm forced the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) to first post that it had cautioned the newspaper vendor and then delete the tweet.
Later, former Tamil Nadu additional chief secretary Jagmohan Singh Raju, who was BJP candidate against Navjot Singh Sidhu in the Amritsar East constituency, tweeted that he was the article’s original author and dared Parliament to start a debate. Gender justice campaigner Gopika Bashi on Friday had had tweeted the image of Bengaluru weekly ‘Aryavrath Express’ and questioned the IRCTC for distributing a “propagandist paper” on board the train. The publication carried articles that called for recognising the “genocide of Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists under Islamic rules”, asked the UN to label Aurangzeb as “perpetrator of holocaust like Hitler”, and called first US Muslim Congresswoman Ilhan Omar a “CIA agent” while reporting her visit to Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir.
