Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday slammed Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat’s remarks on India’s independence, accusing him of committing “treason”.
While addressing party workers and leaders at the inauguration event of the new All India Congress Committee (AICC) headquarters in Delhi, Gandhi said, “I think it is quite symbolic that yesterday, the chief of the RSS said that India never achieved Independence in 1947. He said that true independence was achieved when the Ram Mandir was built. The Constitution was attacked by Mr Mohan Bhagwat yesterday when he said that it was not a symbol of our freedom.”
He was reacting to the Sangh chief’s comment that the true independence of India, which suffered foreign invasions for centuries, was established when the Ram temple was consecrated in Ayodhya last year.
Bhagwat said that after India got political independence from the British on August 15, 1947, a written Constitution was made according to the path shown by that specific vision, which comes out of the "self" of the country, but the document was not run according to the spirit of the vision at that time.
“Mohan Bhagwat has the audacity to inform the nation every two or three days what he thinks about the Independence movement and Constitution. In fact, what he said yesterday is treason as he stated that our Constitution is invalid… In any other country, he would be arrested and tried. To say that India did not get independence in 1947 is an insult to every single Indian. And it’s about time we stop listening to this nonsense that these people think they can just keep parroting out and shouting," the Congress leader said.
Continuing his attack on RSS, Rahul said, "The people who are in power today do not salute the tricolour, do not believe in the national flag, do not believe in the Constitution and they have a completely different vision of India than we do. They want India to be run by a shady, secret society. They want to crush voice of Dalits, minorities, backward classes... There is no other party in this country that can stop them apart from the Congress. Our ideology is thousands of years old and very different from that of the BJP and RSS."
He also said that the BJP and RSS have captured every single institution in the country. "Do not think that we are fighting a fair fight. There is no fairness in this. If you believe that we are fighting a political organisation called the BJP or RSS, you have not understood what is going on. The BJP and the RSS have captured every single institution of our country. We are now fighting the BJP, the RSS and the Indian State itself," he said.
Meanwhile, the BJP has hit back at Rahul Gandhi terming him as anti-national and accusing him of working against the country. "Rahul Gandhi is in remote control of those forces who want to finish the Indian state! His intentions are against national interest," BJP spokesperson Pradeep Bhandari wrote on X.
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