Aditi Tandon
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, June 2
Notwithstanding the consternation in
Congress camp over his upcoming Nagpur visit, former President Pranab Mukherjee
today reiterated his plan to address RSS workers on June 7 saying he would
respond to the issue in Nagpur.
“Whatever I have to say, I will say
in Nagpur. I have received several letters and phone calls but I haven’t
responded to anyone yet,” Bengal daily Anandbazar Patrika today quoted
Mukherjee as saying.
Also read: Nothing wrong if ex-Prez attends RSS function (by
K. Natwar Singh)
The former President’s remarks came
after his ex-colleague in UPA Cabinet Jairam Ramesh joined the growing list of
Congress leaders who have advised him to skip the ceremony in the interest of
“secularism”.
Ramesh, in a letter to Mukherjee, is
learnt to have expressed “hurt” over the move and said the visit would
adversely impact secular solidarity in the country and send wrong signals when
Congress and other parties were fighting the RSS ideology of hate and division.
While Congress continued to maintain
silence on the issue saying it would react after hearing Mukherjee on June 7,
former Finance Minister P Chidambaram recently exhorted Mukherjee to tell the
RSS what was wrong with its ideology. Prior to Chidambaram, another Congress
veteran and Leader of Oppposition in Kerala Ramesh Chennithala expressed the
same sentiment.
Privately all Congress leaders are
stupefied with Mukherjee’s acceptance of the RSS invitation. It is for them a
déjà vu moment considering in June 2017, Mukherjee, then President, invited RSS
chief Mohan Bhagwat for lunch to Rashtrapati Bhavan. The two sat for an hour
while the government engaged the Opposition to build consensus around the
upcoming presidential election candidate.
Congress leaders find yet another
Mukherjee-Bhagwat meeting, nearly a year after the first, discomfiting. It
upsets party president Rahul Gandhi’s consistent campaign against the Sangh as
a “divisive force” and pushes back Congress’ principal anti-BJP agenda on the
eve of 2019 General Election.
“In this age
of social media, optics and messaging matter the most. When a Congress man of
decades and a former President attends an RSS event, he sends multiple signals
to the domestic and global audiences,” says a senior Congress leader. The BJP
is naturally gloating over the developments. Union Minister Nitin Gadkari
recently said, “There is nothing called political untouchability and no cause
to debate the former President’s decision
No comments:
Post a Comment