Within days after Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's warning that those indulging in 'love jihad' should be ready for 'Ram Naam Satya' journey (Hindu funeral chant during the last journey), a BJP lawmaker said that time had come to 'respond' to the 'menace' in the "same language".
"We must get ready to respond in the same language... the police will do what they have to do but we can not wait for the police action," controversial BJP legislator Sangeet Som said.
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In a virtual address to the party workers from his Assembly constituency of Sardhana in UP's Meerut district, Som, whose name had also figured in the 2013 Muzaffarnagar communal riots, which had claimed 60 lives, termed 'love jihad' as "another form of terrorism".
"We can not depend only on the police to deal with cases of love jihad," the MLA said.
Som, who often courted controversy by his remarks, accused the Samajwadi Party (SP) president Akhilesh Yadav and former Congress president Rahul Gandhi of turning a blind eye to the cases of 'love jihad'.
The MLAs' remarks come barely a couple of days after Adityanath's 'Ram Naam Satya' warning and hint that the state government would soon enact a stringent law to deal with the cases of 'love jihad'.
Saffron outfits have been quite vocal against incidents of alleged 'love jihad'. The RSS too had recently indicated that it wanted an effective strategy to prevent such cases.