Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Sunday stepped up his party’s offensive against Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi for voicing “sympathies” for “those who raised slogans for breaking up India”. Jaitley said it was the Congress vice-president’s “ideological hollowness” that he did something that the likes of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi never did nor any Congress leader preceding them.
In his valedictory address to a convention of Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, BJP’s youth wing, Jaitley said it was the country’s “misfortune” that the Congress vice-president sympathised with the actions of a “small group of Jihadists and a bigger group of Maoists”.
The senior BJP leader also described JNUSU leader Kanhaiya Kumar’s speech, delivered following his release on bail, a “victory for us”, saying he had gone to jail for raising anti-India slogans but came back to speak amid slogans of ‘Jai Hind’ and hoisting of the Tricolour.
Jaitley defended the party’s aggressive stand on the JNU row and asked BJP workers to take the “ideological battle forward” while talking about the Government’s achievements with pride. “We will definitely win,” he said.
Maintaining that a change was happening across the country, Jaitley said the Modi Government was voted to fulfil three responsibilities -- to rid the country of dynasty, corruption and hunger and poverty. Jaitley said “dysnastic parties” suffered a big defeat in the 2014 lok Sabha poll.
lashing out at Rahul, the BJP leader said Congress in the past had always been against those wanting to break up the country through the last 100 years of struggle between nationalist and anti-national forces.
“A new trend has started. Some people want to hold an event to commemorate Yakub Memon and some to commemorate Afzal Guru. These people used to comprise a small section of jihadists and a big group of Maoists.
“Slogans were raised for breaking up the country and it was the country’s misfortune that a leader of Congress, which has been in the mainstream so far, went there to express sympathies with those who did so. Mahatma Gandhi never did it, neither did Ambedkar. Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandbhi never did it but he did....It was ideological hollowness,” he said.
The BJP fulfilled its “national responsibility and emerged victorious”, he said, referring to Kanhaiya’s speech without naming the JNU Students’ Union president.
In a similar vein, Jaitley said while the left has had a “historical tradition” of speaking against the national interest, the Congress was always against the conspiracy to break the country except for Emergency when it was supported by the CPI, Jaitley said.
The JNU row and the Opposition attack on the Modi Government and the BJP was at the centre of the two-day BJYM conclave with party chief Amit Shah, Chief Ministers and a number of Union Ministers raising the nationalist pitch and attacking Congress, especially Rahul.
Jaitley also said in last 100 years nationalist forces and communists have clashed and the latter believed in using violence to break up the country when it became Independent.