NEW DELHI: Slamming RSS chief’s claim that India did not gain true independence in 1947 but with the inauguration of the Ayodhya temple, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday said Mohan Bhagwat’s remark is tantamount to “treason” and in any other country, he would be arrested and tried.
“BJP and RSS have captured every single institution of the country. We are now fighting BJP, RSS and the Indian state itself,” he said.
Gandhi said RSS-BJP want “India to be run by a shady, hidden, secret society”, adding that Congress, with Shiva, Guru Nanak, Kabir and others as symbols, is in a “civilizational war” with the RSS ideology. He underlined that only Congress has the courage and the capability to fight RSS. Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge condemned Bhagwat’s statement, warning that such claims will make it difficult for him “to travel around the country”.
In his remarks after the inauguration of the new Congress headquarters, Rahul said, “What Bhagwat said is treason because he is stating that the Constitution is invalid, that everything, the fight against the British is invalid, and he has the audacity to say it in public… To say that India did not get true independence in 1947 is an insult to our freedom fighters, every single Indian citizen and an attack on our Constitution… and it is time we stopped listening to this nonsense that these people think they can keep parroting out, shouting and screaming.”
He added, “Bhagwat has the audacity to inform the nation every two to three days about what he thinks of the freedom movement, about the Constitution.”
As he drew the Congress roots to the freedom movement and painted the RSS-BJP as those “who don’t salute the tricolor or respect the Constitution”, the Gandhi scion said it was “symbolic” that Bhagwat’s statement was made on the eve of the unveiling of the Congress office which is “not an ordinary building” but has “emerged from the soil of our country and as a result of the sacrifice of millions of people”. The Constitution is the “fruit” of the freedom struggle, he said.
“That spirit was attacked by Bhagwat when he said the Constitution was not a symbol of our freedom,” he remarked, with the party brass, including Kharge, Sonia Gandhi, senior leaders and CMs in attendance. Kharge said BJP-RSS did not participate in the freedom struggle and are talking of Ayodhya temple as independence because Bhagwat and PM Narendra Modi inaugurated it.
Rahul’s no-holds-barred attack, in the first speech of the auditorium of the Kotla Marg office, saw him revert to his known charge about “capture of the institutions” by BJP, which has rendered the fight as “unfair”, but also to underline that only Congress can halt the ruling combine.
