On Saturday, the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) engaged in a verbal spat over the naming of the Chandrayaan-3 landing site and an incident in which a teacher was filmed encouraging students to smack his Muslim classmate.
According to SP MP Sambhal Shafiqur Rehman Barq, the designation of "Shiv Shakti Point" as the landing site of the Vikram lander on the Moon was made for racial reasons.
On the other hand, Shehzad Poonawalla, the national spokesperson for the BJP, criticized SP for communalizing the purported event in which a teacher in Uttar Pradesh allegedly asked her pupils to strike a Muslim child.
TOUCHDOWN BY VIKRAM LANDER
The SP leader claimed that APJ Kalam should have been honored in the name of Vikram Lander's touchdown location.
The scientist and former president APJ Abdul Kalam established the groundwork for it. Therefore, if it needs a name, it ought to be after him. This accomplishment shouldn't have been given a Hindu-Muslim hue, according to Barq, as reported by the PTI news agency.
After PM Modi announced "Shiv Shakti Point" while congratulating and interacting with researchers from the Indian Space Research Organization (Isro) in Bengaluru, the matter gave rise to a dispute.
In addition, he proclaimed August 23 to be "National Space Day" and the location of the Chandrayaan-2 lander's 2019 moon crash to be known as "Tiranga Point." On this day, the spacecraft landed on the Moon's south pole.
SLAPPING STUDENT ROW
Shehzad Poonawalla of the BJP accused the SP of communalizing the event in which a teacher told students to slap their Muslim classmates and advised the opposition party to let the law run its own course.
The response comes after SP said that the event was caused by the "politics of hate" of the BJP and the RSS.
"The SP has a propensity of giving every subject a communal spin. When it turned out to be fake news in a previous instance, they did it. Additionally, it has been proven that there was no sectarian undertone, according to BJP national spokesperson Shehzad Poonawalla, who spoke to PTI.
