Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi in a fiery rebuttal has flayed RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat over his comments on the Constitution, accusing him of treason.
Addressing a gathering at Congress’s newly established headquarters at 9A, Kotla Road in New Delhi, he criticised Bhagwat’s recent comments suggesting that the Constitution was “not the symbol of our freedom.”
Posturing as a naysayer of August 15, 1947, Bhagwat has said that the date of Ram temple consecration in Ayodhya should be celebrated as “Pratishtha Dwadashi” since the “true independence” of India, which faced “parachakra” (enemy attack) for several centuries, was established that day.
“After India got political independence from the British on August 15, 1947, a written Constitution was made according to the path shown by that specific vision, which comes out of the “self” of the country, but the document was not run according to the spirit of the vision at that time,” Bhagwat said.
Launching a caustic attack, Gandhi declared, “Mohan Bhagwat had the audacity to inform the country what he thinks about the Independence movement and Constitution. In fact, what he said yesterday is treason as he stated that our Constitution is invalid… In any other country he would be tried. To say India did not get independence in 1947 is an insult to every Indian. And we need to stop listening to this.”
“I think it is quite symbolic that yesterday, the RSS chief said that India never achieved Independence in 1947. He said true independence was achieved when the Ram Mandir was built. The Constitution was attacked by Mr Bhagwat yesterday when he said that it was not a symbol of our independence,” he added.
Unleashing more no-holds-barred vitriol, Gandhi lamented that people in power no longer salute the tricolour and they have a “completely different vision of India than we do.” He said, “They want India to be run by a shady, secret society. They want to crush voice of Dalits, minorities, backward classes… There is no other party in this country that can stop them besides the Congress. Our ideology is thousands of years old and very different from that of the BJP and RSS.”
Further, the Congress MP accused the BJP and RSS of influencing all the institutions of the country. He said, “In the last working committee meeting, I had voiced my concerns regarding the Maharashtra elections… how new voters cropped up between the Lok Sabha and Assembly polls. We are not happy with the way the Election Commission is holding polls nowadays.”
Gandhi asserted that his party workers were an inspiration as they emerged from India’s soil, working hard and making sacrifices for millions of people.
Earlier, Bhagwat’s comments invited criticism from the INDIA bloc Opposition alliance, with Sanjay Raut, MP from the Shiv Sena (UBT) retorting, “‘He should not do politics in the name of Ram Lalla, only then will the nation be independent in its true self.”
Bhagwat has a knack of courting controversies. In a certain context, he said, “Everyone born in the country is a Hindu – of these some are idol-worshipers and some are not. Even Muslims are Hindus by nationality, they are Muslims by faith only. Just as the English live in England, Americans in America and Germans in Germany, Hindus live in Hindustan.”
In 2013, he made an outrageous comment saying that rapes “hardly take place in ‘Bharat’, but they occur frequently in ‘India’.”
On the present controversy, The Telegraph has observed that the RSS’s relation with the Indian freedom movement defies straight descriptions.
In a report, it reminds: “According to the Hindu calendar, the consecration of the Ram temple in Ayodhya took place on Dwadashi of ‘Shukla Paksha’ of Paush month last year. The date in the Gregorian calendar was January 22, 2024. This year, the Paush Shukla Paksha Dwadashi was on January 11. After the first Republic Day in 1950, the Sangh never hoisted the Tricolour at its Nagpur headquarters, sticking to its Bhagwa Dhwaj (saffron flag), inscribed with an “Om”, even on R-Day and I-Day. It changed the practice in 2002 when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was Prime Minister.”
Gandhi’s remarks are another instalment of the clashes between the Congress and the RSS-BJP over national identity and governance.
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