Tharoor’s remark shows up Congress confusion
Congress Member of Parliament Shashi Tharoor's irresponsible remark of comparing freedom-fighter Bhagat Singh to Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union president Kanhaiya Kumar is symptomatic of his party having lost the plot on nationalism. Ever since the February 9 events came into the public domain and been debated, the Congress has demonstrated muddled thinking on the issue. This is largely because of the ill-advised decision of its leader Rahul Gandhi to address JNU students after the anti-national slogans were raised, and his support to them and condemnation of the Centre's move to ‘silence dissent'. Since then, party leaders have been tying themselves up in knots trying to nuance their stand. Having witnessed the massive public reaction against the likes of Kanhaiya Kumar and those others who either raised ‘break India' slogans or remained silent during the provocation, the Congress has been desperately seeking to control the damage. But its confusion has been exposed more than once. For instance, in the midst of the controversy, senior Congress leader and former Minister for Home Affairs P Chidambaram opined that Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru should not have been hanged. This is precisely what a bunch of JNU students-turned-rabble-rousers have been saying. Chidambaram's statement was promptly refuted by his party's spokespersons. In a more recent case, the former Home Affairs Minister said that the suspension of an All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen MlA from the Maharashtra Assembly on the ground that he had refused to chant ‘Bharat Mata ki jai' and also said some objectionable things, was wrong. The problem is that Congress legislators had backed the suspension, with one of them even moving a proposal to this effect. There's more ingredient to the Congress's cup of confusion: The Ishrat Jahan encounter issue. Fresh revelations have effectively established the Congress's role in diluting her links to the lashkar-e-Tayyeba. The party is now spinning out one irrelevant argument after another to divert attention from the growing perception that it had played into the hands of anti-India terror elements.
It would have been prudent for Tharoor to have held his horse. But he got carried away in the midst of students at the JNU campus, where he had gone to address a gathering on the issue of sedition. Incidentally, Kanhaiya Kumar along with other students face the charge of sedition and are out on interim bail. While holding forth on how the anti-sedition law had been used by the British against freedom-fighters such as Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, he responded to a prompt from a student in the crowd and said that Shaheed Bhagat Singh was the “Kanhaiya Kumar of his time”. It's bad enough to compare the JNU students' leader with the legendary freedom-fighter, who gave his life for the country's independence, but what Tharoor did was worse; he compared Bhagat Singh with Kanhaiya Kumar and thus brought the former several hundred pedestals down! Now, of course, Tharoor is going around claiming that he was merely stating a context and not drawing an analogy. Nobody buys into his clarification not even his senior party leaders, who have been left red-faced.