Lucknow, May 19: Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati Wednesday ordered a probe after a Hindi monthly, patronised by the ruling Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), published an article condemning various Hindu rituals and Brahmanical practices.
The May issue of the periodical has also made alleged derogatory references to temples, Vedas, Upanishads and Ramayana.
Even Mahatma Gandhi has not been spared and referred to as “enemy of Dalits” while Hindu religion has been dubbed a “slur on human values”.
Published from Jaunpur, the journal is titled “Ambedkar Today”, whose calendars can be seen hanging in every senior bureaucrats’ office in the state secretariat here.
Even though the magazine has been in publication for more than five years, it became one of the journals patronised by the BSP. This fetched the magazine government advertisements worth crores of rupees.
The Crime Branch of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) will probe the case.
Meanwhile, a government release said the magazine editor, Rajiv Ratan, a close kin of senior BSP leader Paras Nath Maurya, did not know about the offending article.
“When we made inquiries from the editor, he claimed the article had gone into print without his knowledge as it was not physically possible for him to go through every article,” said an official release.
“The editor adds that he would not have allowed the article to be published in case he had the opportunity to take a look at it,” it said.
The editor also feigned ignorance about the mention of the names of several prominent BSP ministers in the list of patrons of the magazine.
These are Naseeuddin Siddiqui, Babu Singh Kushwaha, Swami Prasad Maurya and Paras Nath Maurya.
–Agencies