At a meeting of Congress leaders in Kerala, Mrs Gandhi said communal violence had increased in states like Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra in the past 11 weeks since the BJP came to power. (File photo)
In a sharp attack on the ruling BJP, Congress president Sonia Gandhi today said communal violence had "increased drastically" since the new government took charge in May.
At a meeting of Congress leaders in Kerala, Mrs Gandhi said communal violence had increased in states like Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra in the past 11 weeks since the BJP came to power.
"During UPA 1 and 2, there were hardly such instances. But in a very short span we have had nothing less than 600 incidents of communal violence in UP and perhaps as many in Maharashtra. Why suddenly all these communal instances after the BJP came to power? These instances are deliberately created to divide our society on religious lines. We must condemn this," she said.
Her words underscored the Congress' campaign to highlight what it calls "communal politics" on BJP's watch.
Last week, Sonia Gandhi's son and party vice president Rahul Gandhi protested in the well of the Lok Sabha in an unusual show of aggression, demanding a discussion on communal violence.
He later accused Speaker Sumitra Mahajan of bias and alleged that "only one man is heard in Parliament", an allusion to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The government finally agreed to a debate, which is expected today.
On the weekend Mr Gandhi alleged in a newspaper interview that the communal conflict in Uttar Pradesh have been "artificially and deliberately engineered" as part of a strategy to "divide the poor," clearly aiming at the BJP.
Mr Modi retorted at a BJP meeting on Saturday, "Despite their humiliating defeat, those who cannot move away from vote-bank politics are harming the social fabric...This politics of promoting polarisation and divisiveness for electoral gain must end."