New Delhi: AAP on Sunday accused BJP of settling Rohingya refugees in the city while pretending to oppose them. Senior AAP functionaries, including CM Atishi, MP Sanjay Singh, and former deputy CM Manish Sisodia, cited a 2022 post on X by Union minister Hardeep Singh Puri as evidence of BJP’s involvement in housing Rohingyas in EWS flats in Delhi’s Bakkarwala.
“Hardeep Puri’s tweet proves that BJP conspired to settle Rohingyas in Delhi while pretending to oppose them. They provided EWS flats, security, and facilities to them but misled the public with their hate rhetoric. This is BJP’s dirty and deceitful politics,” Sisodia said in a post in Hindi on X.
Atishi echoed similar sentiments, saying, “BJP was so desperate to accuse Arvind Kejriwal that they forgot their own role in bringing and settling Rohingyas in Delhi. Hardeep Puri’s tweet has exposed the truth to the people of Delhi.”
She said: “On Aug 17, 2022, Puri tweeted that India has a tradition of welcoming refugees and announced plans to relocate Rohingyas to EWS flats in Delhi, ensuring them basic amenities, UNHCR IDs, and security. This contradicts BJP’s public stance on the issue.”
Singh said, “Delhiites can now see who truly brought and settled Rohingyas in the city. BJP’s duplicity stands exposed.”
Other AAP functionaries, including Sandeep Pathak, Raghav Chadha and Gopal Rai, also took to social media to slam BJP, accusing it of indulging in divisive politics.
Hitting back, Delhi BJP president Virendra Sachdeva said Kejriwal and his associates, who claimed to be educated, were misleading people by citing an old post from 2022 by Union minister Puri. The post mentioned the settlement of legal refugees, not illegal infiltrators, he said. He said that ever since his party launched a campaign to disenfranchise illegally-residing Rohingyas and Bangladeshis and expel them from the country, Kejriwal and other AAP functionaries were resorting to baseless rhetoric to divert the attention of people from the core issues affecting Delhi.
“The real issue is not the settlement of legal refugees but the presence of millions of illegally residing Rohingyas and Bangladeshis, not just in Delhi but also in states like UP, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Jharkhand,” Sachdeva was quoted as saying in a statement issued by BJP.
AAP raised the issue of Rohingya infiltrators even in 2022, he said, adding, “Back then, we said, and we reiterate now, that refugees are a separate matter, but infiltrators should be kept in detention camps, not in flats.”
