Rambhapuri seers warns of waging religious war

Bengaluru, Mar 23: Film producer, philanthropist and entrepreneur V K Mohan committed suicide by hanging himself in a hotel in the city on Monday, police said.

Mohan, who hailed from Kundapur Taluk, Udupi District, was a famous film producer and hotelier.

According to police, Mohan arrived at the hotel on Sunday night and when he did not open the door of his room on Monday, hotel staffs, grew suspicious and peeped through the room window, found him hanging.

The Karnataka BJP, which faced action on Twitter earlier this month over incendiary tweets, this time has passed the blame of Sangh Parivar sponsored Delhi violence to the victims.

In an insensitive tweet on Friday, it dubbed the protests against the notorious Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) as "fake" and added that the violence that followed was "the most well-planned assault on the Idea of India," in an apparent attempt to portray the victims as villains.

The handle, notorious for tweets targeting Muslims, blamed the clashes that erupted in Delhi between people demonstrating for and against the CAA on "so called 'Peacefuls'" - a known right-wing slur for Muslims.

ZERO - Number of Indians who lost their Citizenship due to the #CAA.

40+ - Number of Indians who lost their lives due to the #CAARiots.

The fake protests against CAA and subsequent riots by the so called Peacefuls are the most well planned assault on the "Idea of India."

— BJP Karnataka (@BJP4Karnataka) February 28, 2020

Many people on social media called out the tweet for misleading people and covering up the role of Delhi BJP leader Kapil Mishra's provocative speech for triggering the violence or the failure of the Delhi Police, which reports to the former BJP chief and Union Home Minister Amit Shah, in controlling the riots.

Earlier this month, the Karnataka BJP had tweeted a video of Muslim women standing in queue to vote in the Delhi elections, showing their voter ID cards, with the snarky caption: "Keep the documents safe, you will need to show them again during NPR (National Population Register) exercise."

Soon after, the party unit's Twitter handle was blocked by the social media platform for 24 hours after many accused it of encouraging Islamophobia.

NPR has been widely criticised by opposition parties as a precursor to the government's planned NRC or National Register of Citizens which intends to make Indians prove their citizenship with documents that many poor or illiterate do not possess.

Many fear that combined with the already imposed CAA - which promises citizenship to only non-Muslim refugees from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh - the NRC can be used to make millions of Muslims stateless.

The government has denied the allegation and said the CAA only intends to help those who have faced religious persecution. In recent weeks, it has gone back on its rhetoric on the NRC which was announced by Amit Shah in parliament as "it will certainly happen".

The CAA, which was cleared by parliament in December, has triggered deadly protests in the country which left at least 25 dead till Sunday. Since then, at least 42 more people have been killed as large-scale violence erupted in northeast Delhi and hundreds of homes and shops have been burned to the ground.

Bengaluru, Mar 22: Monday's only pending II PU exam (English) and SSLC exams scheduled to start on March 27 have been postponed due to Covid-19 concerns. The new dates will be announced in April first week.

The decision was taken after a meeting with chief minister BS Yediyurappa on Sunday morning, said state primary and secondary education minister S Suresh Kumar.

Around 8.25 lakh students are to appear for the Class 10 exam.

"I appeal to SSLC students not to get frustrated. I know you're fully prepared, fully geared up. But this is a peculiar situation which calls for hard decisions. The new timetable will be published very soon. Students should treat is as an extended study leave. Please revise more. Do not treat this as a relaxation time. You'll have plenty of time to relax after the exams," he said.