Saleem Shervani interview: I don’t understand why Akhilesh so shy of using the word Muslim… I kept telling him

Former Union minister and five-time MP Saleem Shervani has resigned as the Samajwadi Party (SP) national general secretary, accusing party president Akhilesh Yadav of “ignoring” the PDA communities. The PDA acronym, coined by Akhilesh himself, stands for Pichda (backwards), Dalits and Alpasankhyak (minorities). In his resignation letter sent to Akhilesh on Sunday, Shervani, 70, asked how the SP was different from the BJP and that the party’s candidates for the February 27 Rajya Sabha elections did not have a Muslim name. In an interview with The Indian Express, Shervani speaks about these issues and his next moves. Excerpts:

Why did you resign from your Samajwadi Party post?

For a long time, I had been telling Akhilesh Yadav ji that the distance between Muslims and the party has been increasing, that we don’t raise our voice enough for the community, 80-90% of which voted for the SP (in the 2022 UP Assembly polls). I am not talking about criminals, but innocent citizens are facing hardships like bulldozer action, mosque demolitions, youngsters being sent to jail in a wrongful manner… Even after he (Akhilesh) announced PDA as our main pitch for the Lok Sabha polls, when he declared the party’s candidates for the Rajya Sabha, we saw that “P” and “A” got no representation.

Do you think the SP doesn’t talk about issues pertaining to the Muslim community?

Today, the atmosphere in the country is such that anyone who raises rightful issues of the Muslims, are branded as anti-national. The parties are scared over vote-bank politics. I have said this on TV that if I feel safe in this country, it is because of the majority Hindu community… No one is raising genuine issues pertaining to the Muslim community, including the SP.

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