'No one can stop people from participating in Tablighi Jammat', says Congress leader Furqan Ansari

Ansari said the government was blaming the Jamaat to hide its own failures.

Attacking the Narendra Modi-led government at the Centre, he said the government should answer who gave the permission to Maulanas from abroad to come to India and why visas were issued to them and the tests were not performed at the airports at the time when the world was grappling with novel Coronavirus.

Ansari claimed that the government had granted the permission to organise the Jamaat.

By not being proactive, the government has made a big mistake and now it was shying away from taking the responsibility of the sudden rise in coronavirus cases in the state.

Apparently refusing that social distancing is the most effective way of containing the coronavirus spread and the highly contagious virus is a droplet-borne contagion and spreads easily from an infected person to a healthy one, he said the Maulvis and Maulanas who participated in the Jamaat offer Namaz five times a day and so have to take bath and clean their body parts daily. Therefore, making an allegation that Tablighi Jamaat had turned Delhi into a COVID-19 hotspot was wrong.

The former Congress MP said that people from all castes and communities are working to make the lockdown successful.

He said that all the mosques in the country were closed ,and it would not be unfair to blame a particular community for the spread of the illness.

At a time the idea of social distancing was embraced both by the Centre and the state governments, Tablighi Jamaat, an "orthodox" missionary, congregated around 3,000 people at Alami Markaz Banglewali Masjid in Nizamuddin here flouting all norms of self-isolation.

Reports suggest around 2000-3000 preachers had congregated at the event of Tablighi Jamaat preachers in mid-March, just days after the Delhi government had banned the gatherings of 200 people at any place in the wake of the outbreak of Novel Coronavirus.

Delhi Police could evacuate the 216 Tablighi Jamaat workers and hospitalise them after the intervention of National Security Advisor(NSA) Ajit Doval as the head of Nizamuddin Markaz Maulana Saad had refused the entry of Delhi Police im the mosque.