Senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi questioned Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s take on caste politics, and asked why Mr. Modi asserted his own Other Backward Classes (OBC) identity repeatedly if by his own admission “poverty was the biggest caste’.
Addressing two public meetings in Jagdalpur and Kharasia in Chhattisgarh, Mr. Gandhi accused the Bharatiya Janata Party of treating tribals as animals, as he raised the ‘adivasi’ versus ‘vanvasi’ nomenclature issue yet again in the poll-bound State nearly a third of whose population comprises tribals.
“Today, in his speech, he [Mr. Modi] said there was only one caste in the country and that was India’s poor. That means in his new speech he is saying that in this country, there are no Dalits, no adivasi, no backwards and we all know that there are tribals in the country, there are tribal languages, there is tribal culture, there is tribal history, there are Dalits. Dalits are insulted, they are troubled on a daily basis, the backward are not getting their due rights..,” Mr. Gandhi said.
