The Congress party came down heavily on an advertisement issued by the Karnataka BJP in a section of the vernacular newspapers on Saturday that sought to hold the country’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, responsible for partition of India and termed it as a “blatant lie”.
Addressing a press conference at Kalale near Nanjangud along the route of the Rahul Gandhi-led Bharat Jodo Yatra, Mr. Siddaramaiah said the BJP has become nervous about the unprecedented response the Congress padayatra had begun to draw and was resorting to such ‘misleading’ advertisements out of frustration.
Mr. Siddaramaiah said it was V.D. Savarkar, as the then President of Hindu Mahasabha, who had ruled out the possibility of India remaining as one nation because of the presence of Hindus as well as Muslims while delivering the presidential address of the Hindu Mahasabha in Ahmedabad in 1937. He said Hindus and Muslims cannot live together and said separation was inevitable, the Congress leader claimed.
He also said the RSS leaders including the founder Hegdewar and its long-serving president Golwarkar did not participate in any freedom struggle whereas the Congress, which fought for the country’s freedom, had also united more than 600 States that existed prior to Independence in the country.
He said the Nehru family had made a lot of sacrifices for the country with leaders like Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi losing their lives in assassinations and Mr. Nehru spending more than nine years in jail. “Did Mr. Nehru go to jail for his own work and got arrested. Did he go to jail like Amit Shah?”, Mr Siddaramaiah asked before stating that the BJP had of late become a “lie manufacturing factory”.
All India Congress Committee’s (AICC) Chairperson of Media and Publicity Department Pawan Khera, who also addressed the press conference, said the right wing ideology of India has always been on the wrong side of history. Endorsing Mr. Siddaramaiah, he said the Hindu Mahasabha made itself clear at its 1937 session in Ahmedabad that Hindus and Muslims cannot be one nation.
“In 1941, Mohammed Ali Jinnah had repeated the same in the Lahore session of Muslim League”, he said. In 1942, when Congress left all the provincial governments to participate in the Quit India Movement, the Hindu Mahasabha and Muslim League had come together in three provincial assemblies viz. West Bengal, NWFP and Sindh, where the first resolution for Pakistan was passed, Mr. Khera said. “I challenge them. They were in alliance with Muslim League and they did not stop it. So, who created partition?”, he asked.
He also sought to remind the BJP that it was Rahul Gandhi’s grandmother Indira Gandhi, who “divided Pakistan”, referring to the creation of an independent Bangladesh after its secession from Pakistan in 1971.
