NEW DELHI: BJP president Amit Shah has squarely blamed Samajwadi Party for rising communal tension in Uttar Pradesh while dismissing talk of marginalization of home minister and former BJP chief Rajnath Singh, adding that rumours about Singh's family were not the handiwork of anyone in the party.

On the so-called 'love jihad', the headline-grabbing name for interreligious marriages that are allegedly a ruse for conversion, Shah said this was more a media creation and that BJP had no big plans to take it up as a campaign issue.

But he added that he sees nothing wrong in BJP responding to "a grave social problem" in "genuine cases" of "injustice". The 49-year-old politician, who led BJP to victory in a staggering 71 Lok Sabha seats in the 80-seat Uttar Pradesh and who was on Wednesday charged by state police in Muzaffarnagar over an April 4 campaign speech, said if polarization was his party's poll strategy, every state facing elections would have seen a rise in communal temperature.

But since only UP is facing this problem, the BJP chief argued, it was SP's partisan strategy that was responsible. "There is no communal tension anywhere except in UP. BJP is everywhere, but SP is only in UP. That only means that SP's one-sided vote bank consolidation politics is responsible for increase in communal tension. There's no tension even in Jammu & Kashmir... a (poll bound) sensitive state," Shah told ET in his first major media interaction since becoming party chief.

(TOI)