NCP(SP) accuses BJP-RSS of 'theatrics' over Tiranga Yatras
The opposition Nationalist Congress Party (Sharad Pawar faction) on Thursday, August 13, accused the RSS-BJP combine of indulging in theatrics over "Tiranga Yatras," alleging the ruling party was stage-managing nationalism ahead of Independence Day.
State NCP(SP) spokesperson Mahesh Tapase, addressing a press conference in Mumbai, said the BJP and its parent organisation, the RSS, had turned the Tiranga Yatras into a photo opportunity while lecturing the country on patriotism, calling patriotism something with a history rather than an annual costume for the cameras.
Tapase said the RSS hoisted the national flag at its Nagpur headquarters only twice in its early years on August 15, 1947, and January 26, 1950 and did not fly the tricolour there again for 52 years.
He said the flag was forcibly hoisted in 2001 by three young activists of the Rashtrapremi Yuva Dal, against whom the RSS filed a police case, and that it took a court case and public criticism before the organisation began hoisting the flag regularly at its headquarters.
He also alleged that former RSS chief M.S. Golwalkar had dismissed India's independence movement as mere "territorial nationalism" and that the organisation's mouthpiece had disparaged the tricolour that freedom fighters died for. Tapase asked whether current RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat would address this history in his planned Independence Day interaction with Gen Z.
Tapase said the RSS, founded in 1925, did not take part in any major campaign of the freedom struggle between 1925 and 1947, including the Civil Disobedience Movement or the 1942 Quit India Movement, at a time when leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel were imprisoned by the British.
He argued that the tricolour belongs to every Indian who fought and sacrificed for it from the Congress to socialists, revolutionaries and communists and not to those who, in his words, once called it inauspicious. He said an organisation could not stay away from the freedom struggle and then, decades later, claim to love the movement.
The BJP has organised Tiranga Yatras nationwide in the run-up to Independence Day.
