Bhopal: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) president and Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi on Tuesday alleged that the collector of Vidisha district in Madhya Pradesh was transferred because he followed the law while dealing with the Bijamandal controversy.
The Bharatiya Janata Party government in the state on Saturday transferred a number of IAS officials including Vidisha collector Buddhesh Kumar Vaidya who was replaced with Roshan Kumar Singh.
In a post on “X”, Owaisi said, “In Madhya Pradesh, Sangh outfits demanded that they should be allowed to pray in a mosque. The District Collector noted that the structure was a mosque in ASI gazette & refused permission. The collector was transferred because he followed the law.
“This is the danger of the Wakf Amendment Bill. The government wants to give expansive powers to the collector. If someone says that a masjid is not a masjid, the collector must follow the mob’s demands or s/he’ll be transferred. No amount of evidence will be sufficient,” the MP further said.
A group of Hindus recently submitted a memorandum to collector Vaidya, requesting him to open the 11th century Bijamandal site in Vidisha city for offering prayers on the occasion of Nagpanchami festival.
The collector forwarded the plea to the ASI which on August 2 stated, citing a gazette notification of 1951, that Bijamandal was not a temple, but a mosque.
Vaidya told PTI subsequently that the ASI is the custodian of the structure, hence he forwarded the memorandum to it.
Hindu leader Shubham Verma, on the other hand, claimed that the Hindus had been praying at the structure (outside it) for three decades, and were never told that it was a mosque.
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