What have I done to earn ‘Dr Terror’ tag, questions preacher Zakir Naik

In a four-page “open letter” released here, Naik posed five questions to the government as to what he has done to earn the tags of ‘terror preacher’ and ‘Dr Terror’.

“Why now? I have been preaching for 25 years not just in India but across the world. What exactly did I do now to earn the tags of ‘terror preacher’, ‘Dr Terror’? Of 150 countries where I am respected, I am called a ‘terrorist influencer’ in my own country. What an irony!” the 50-year-old televangelist asked.

“Despite exhaustive investigations, not a single conclusive evidence of wrong doing was reported by any governmental agency. But now investigators are being asked to repeat and continue the probe. Why?” he sought to know. On the government’s action against his NGO, he asked why would the government renew IRF’s FCRA registration and then cancel it?

“Is there design to leaking confidential information of the government, solicitor general and the MHA? Is there a design to leaking selective government documents to the media?” the letter said. Naik, a doctor-turned Salafist preacher, said the entire row in the last few months have come as a “shock” to him and termed it as “murder of democracy and strangulation of fundamental rights”.

The Rs 50 lakh donation to Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, headed by Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, by controversial Islamic preacher Zakir Naik’s NGO was a ‘bribe’ to ‘shelter’ his ‘anti-national’ activities, BJP alleged on Saturday. 

Mounting a sharp attack on Congress, Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad accused “vested interests” within the UPA government of protecting Naik as he showed a purported reply by then Information and Broadcasting Minister Manish Tewari in the Lok Sabha in 2012 where he had named Naik’s Peace TV as among 24 illegal foreign channels whose contents were not conducive to India’s security environment.

He asked Congress why it did not return the donation given to it in 2011 when its own government had expressed security concern with regard to Naik’s TV channel.