Even as India is scrambling to find the members of the Tablighi Jamaat, certain state governments are refusing to even share data on their numbers and whereabouts.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday refused to share any information about people from the state who had attended the Tablighi Jamaat event in Delhi last month. “Don’t ask such communal questions,” Banerjee responded angrily to reporters during a press conference when asked how many attendees of the Nizamuddin event had been traced in the state.
Financial Express even reported that while a link of the press conference at the Bengal secretariat was posted on Banerjee’s official Facebook page, but the portion containing the question on Tablighi Jamaat and Mamata’s response to it was edited out.
This isn’t the first time a state has refused to give stats on members of the Tablighi Jamaat. After reporting on the number of Jamaat cases in the state for days, Congress-ruled Rajasthan has recently decided to not share data around Jamaat cases going forward, deleting the column from its press briefings.
The Tablighi Jamaat accounts for nearly 30 percent of India’s overall coronavirus cases. More than 25,000 Jamaat attendees and their contacts have been traced and quarantined, while 50 have gone missing in Maharashtra.
This is not good for country. We should not do vote bank politics