The Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s (VHP) spokesperson Vinod Bansal said on Saturday that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had to clarify whether it supported the views expressed by its spokesperson Shazia Ilmi in her recent article published in a national daily, in which, he alleged, she was trying to “divide the party and vitiate its image by supporting the anti-India gang crying for ‘jihadist’ forces”.
Ms. Ilmi, in her write-up titled “Doing right by Bilkis Bano” on the early release of 11 men convicted in the Bilkis Bano case, said that her personal sense of justice had been betrayed by the incident.
Mr. Bansal alleged that the article was a conspiracy to defame the VHP, an organisation that works on the principle of treating every woman as a “mother”. Ms. Ilmi was comparing the VHP with “jihadis”, he said.
