Opposition parties should unanimously decide to have a one-on-one fight by fielding a single candidate against the BJP to defeat it in polls, former Union minister Arun Shourie said today.
"As in Islamic extremism, if somebody is just preaching, it didn't matter but when they took to arms and captured geographical territories, it became a real problem. You have to defeat them militarily," he said here.
"So also in a democracy, defeating such forces has to be through electoral reforms. Leaders of opposition and so on, (should take) just one vow: Only one candidate against the BJP candidate," Shourie said at a discussion on 'The Angry Tide - Rise Of Aggressive Hinduism' in the Tata Literature Live.
"The RSS and others will draw lessons from that. They just have to say, my only condition is let us field just one candidate," he said.
"We must remember that any group can be inflamed and that very horrible deeds are not necessarily done by very horribly wicked people, they are done by ordinary people," he said.
Journalist Akshaya Mukul and Thomas Blom Hansen, professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, were also a part of the discussion.
Disclaimer: No Business Standard Journalist was involved in creation of this content
