I DON'T BELIEVE IN ANYTHING CALLED ISLAMIC TERRORISM: PRANAB

Stating that no religion supports terrorism, the External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee on August 16 said that he did not believe that there was anything called Islamic terrorism. “Terrorism believes in nothing but hatred and destruction,” Mukherjee said while delivering a lecture on Swami Vivekananda’s contribution to India’s freedom struggle at the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture in Kolkata. He said the acts of the terrorists were not just against any person or society, but against the basic tenets of humanism. He said that the concept of nationalism was propagated first in India by Swami Vivekananda. “You cannot ignore religion but the question is how one uses it, whether to bring people together or divide them,” he said adding that Gandhiji’s daily prayer meetings had a role in bringing together the people of the country for the freedom struggle against the British rule. Swami Vivekananda also used religion in propagating the cause of nationalism and freedom struggle, he said.