The tiger can’t change its stripes, the leopard its spots. BJP cannot shed its anti-Muslim obsession. This is the lesson learnt at the UP BJP’s executive meet at Mathura last week.

To make sure that the anti-Muslim hysteria in UP is further stoked for the by-elections to 12 UP Assembly seats, and for further build-up to be cashed in at the polls in 2017, the UP party chief blatantly accused Muslims of “99.99 percent” of all rapes in the state.

Umakant Vajpayee, the party president, on August 23 brazenfacedly named Muslims saying they were running a “love jehad” to marry Hindu women and convert them to Islam. He asked whether their religion allowed them to rape women. He alleged that the Samajwadi Party government had allowed them to do so.

It was not clear from where he got the figures for “99.99 percent” of all rapes being perpetuated by Muslims. Keeping aside the transparent falsehood of such statistics, the idea of “love jehad” itself is a contradiction in terms and yet another example of the Sangh’s failed attempt a coining smart language.

Love and jehad are two different modes of thought and action. One either makes love or war. No one can do both in the same moment. An act of love can never be an act of war.

The dishonesty and dangerousness of this posturing was most starkly visible in the ageing, out-of-work actress and BJP’s Mathura MP, Hema Malini. This lady, surgically lifted and tucked in, with a fixed synthetic smile on her face, mentally living in the 70s and 80s when she was a popular actress, said something that exposed her hypocrisy.

Malini got up at the party meeting to express concern over love jehad and promised to raise the issue in parliament. The lady has forgotten that she herself is a love jehadi who married the already married Dharmendra after both of them officially “converted” to Islam. Thus she cheated her ancestral faith, Dharmendra’s duely married wife, and the law of land. She should be the last person to raise this bogus issue in public.

In BJP she is not the lone love jehadi. There are the two Muslim stalwarts in the party–Shahnawaz Hussain and Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi–who have Hindu wives acquired after long love jehad. With such hypocrites in its ranks BJP should not rake in this issue. The Congress and SP’s response to this vicious attack is more reasonable. These two parties have asserted that this is a bogus issue as Constitutionally every Indian is free to marry whoever he or she likes, whichever religion they, or one of them belong to.