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NEW DELHI: On Syama Prasad Mookerjee’s 121st birth anniversary, his nephew Chittatosh Mookerjee sensationally claimed the ideals of his uncle and that of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are different, in an unhinged interview with The New Indian.
Reacting to it, the Congress slammed BJP on the birth anniversary of the Jan Sangh founder, whose sacrifices in the Jammu and Kashmir region, have often been invoked by the party.
Speaking to The New Indian, Pawan Khera, chairman of the Media and Publicity Department of the Congress said, “What (Narendra) Modi and Amit) Shah are practising is not even an ideology.”
Hitting out at the BJP over the links with the Udaipur tailor Kanhaiya Lal Teli’s murder accused Riyaz Attari and Lashkar-eTaiba (LeT) terrorist Talib Hussain, who was allegedly a member of the saffron party, the Congress leader said, “Wonder what Shyama Prasad Mookerjee have to say on the collusion of the party with terrorists.”
He was responding to a question that Chittatosh Mookerjee, the 93-year-old nephew of Syama Prasad Mookerjee was not a “religious zealot” who sought to establish the Hindutva in India.
Chittatosh, who has been a Chief Justice of Calcutta and Bombay High Courts, had said, “The ideals of Jana Sangh, the party which he founded, are not the same as that of BJP, the party that formed out of Jana Sangh. Some of the things he did say that they have kept in their ideas but the identity is not the same between these two parties.”
“My uncle Syama Prasad Mookerjee emphasised on Parliamentary politics and believed in constitutional principles. He did not, in that way, pronounce that Hindutva must be established. That was not his idea. He did believe in preserving Indian culture, its ideals,” Chittatosh said.
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Khera’s comments come at a time when battle lines have been drawn in India between communities and political parties over the barbaric killing of a Hindu tailor Kanhaiya Lal Teli in Rajasthan’s Udaipur in full public view by two Muslim men, FIR against ex-BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma’s comments and police cases against a Canada-based filmmaker.
The BJP has denied Udaipur tailor killer and LeT terrorist arrested from J&K as the party workers.
Khera, while addressing a press conference, slammed the BJP and asked if it was inspired by the alliance between the Hindu Mahasabha and the Muslim League in which extremists of all religions banded together to prevent nationalist forces like the Congress to come to power.
“Two incidents in the past week have exposed the two-faced Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP),” Khera had said.
He said that first, we learned that one of the accused in Kanhaiya Lal’s horrific murder in Udaipur was a BJP worker. “Then it emerged that a captured Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist in Jammu and Kashmir was not only a BJP office-bearer who had previously been captured in photos with Home Minister Amit Shah and was also planning to launch attacks on the Amarnath Yatra,” he said.
The Congress leader said that it was shocking that the BJP, a party that loses no opportunity to preach to Indians about nationalism, has members and office-bearers who are deeply implicated in violent anti-national activities.
Khera appealed to the people to see through the BJP’s “fake nationalism” and its disturbing willingness to flirt with anti-national forces.
“What kind of an ideology finds a place for both Nupur Sharma and Riyaz Attari? And accommodates radicals like Talib Hussain? Is the BJP inspired by the alliance between the Hindu Mahasabha and the Muslim League in which extremists of all religions banded together to prevent nationalist forces like the Congress to come to power?” he had said.
