Snubbed by BJP brass, Sangeet Som calls off rally on love jihad

LUCKNOW: BJP's hardline neta and former Sardhana MLA, Sangeet Singh Som, has called off his June 30 rally in Meerut on 'Love jihad and rising population of Muslims' - reportedly after drawing a reprimand from the party brass.
Sources said the party leadership expressed its "serious reservations" over the rally which was being organized around the culmination of 'Maha-Sampark Abhiyan' - a mega mass contact programme launched by the BJP to mark nine years of the Modi government.
When contacted Som confirmed that the rally had been postponed following "directions of the high command". "For the past 10 years, I've been raising the issue of love jihad and demographic changes that have been occurring because of the uncontrolled rise in population of "one particular religious community". I will seek permission from the party leadership for the rally sometime later," he told TOI.
Som, who hails from the Thakur community, is the second BJP leader after Kaiserganj MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh to draw flak from the party for side-stepping organisational line and resorting to an independent show of strength. Singh, also a Thakur, had invited the ire of the BJP leadership after he planned a rally in Ayodhya on June 5 in an apparent move to counter the protest by women wrestlers who had accused him of sexual harassment.
Sources said BJP's west UP unit too has reprimanded Som for organizing a rally which could have serious bearings in the communally sensitive region. BJP's west UP president Satyendra Sisodia told TOI that Som was cautioned about the rally and asked to seek permission from the high command.
BJP sources said the party is in no mood to allow Som whip up a communal narrative that may be detrimental to the saffron outfit even as it gears up for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
Som was one of the accused in the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots and was booked under the National Security Act in September 2013. Justice Vishnu Sahai Commission's report on Muzaffarnagar riots had put him on top of the list of those responsible for the communal flare-up. Som was booked for showing clips from the riots as part of a documentary before the 2017 assembly elections. Som won from Sardhana by defeating SP's Atul Pradhan, a Gurjar, by over 21,000 votes, in 2017. That was Som's second win, but he lost the seat in 2022 assembly elections to Pradhan.