Criticism
The term has been called as a "myth" by the journalist Balbir Punj who claims that the term is an invention of the Indian National Congress party to demonise their political opposition as "terrorists". Similar views have been expressed by other journalists in India Bahukutumbi Raman, former head of the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), criticised the term as a tool for political posturing toward the Muslim minority.< Kanchan Gupta and Swapan Dasgupta, have accused investigators of leaking statements about saffron terror to the media to promote the agenda of the Congress. Raman accused the media of measuring Muslim and Hindu suspects by different yardsticks.
The Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) president, Rajnath Singh, denounced claims of Hindu terrorists as "vilification of Hindu saints and army officers in the name of Hindu terrorism". In 2010, the internet whistleblower organization WikiLeaks released documents attesting to some leaders of the Indian National Congress alleging involvement of Hindu right-wing groups in the death of ATS chief Hemant Karkare during the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. The cable concluded that such allegations were being used for electoral gains. The term "Saffron Terror" was prominently used by some Congress party members in this campaign, most prominently by Digvijay Singh. The BJP criticised these statements and filed a complaint with the Election Commission of India citing it as a violation of the Model Code of Conduct for guidance of political parties. The Election Commission issued a show-cause notice to Digvijay Singh on this complaint. Hindu spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar has also criticized the usage of the term, saying that it is a myth and insult to Hindu religion, which he said is the most tolerant religion.
The main opposition party BJP accused the government of targeting Hindus.
Read more about this topic: Saffron Terror
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“Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige through being mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)