Thiruvananthapuram Member of Parliament Shashi Tharoor has stirred up a controversy after he claimed that a repeat victory for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2019 Lok Sabha Elections will lead to the creation of a ‘Hindu Pakistan.’
The Congress MP was speaking at an event in Thiruvananthapuram on Wednesday.
“If they (BJP) win a repeat in the Lok Sabha, our democratic constitution, as we understand it, will not survive as they will have all the elements they need to tear apart the constitution of India and write a new one,” Shashi Tharoor stated, as quoted by ANI.
“That new one will be the one which will enshrine principles of Hindu Rashtra, that'll remove equality for minorities, that'll create a Hindu Pakistan and that isn't what Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru, Sardar Patel, Maulana Azad and the great heroes of the freedom struggle fought for,” he added.
That new one will be the one which will enshrine principles of Hindu Rashtra, that'll remove equality for minorities, that'll create a Hindu Pakistan & that isn't what Mahatama Gandhi, Nehru, Sardar Patel, Maulana Azad & great heroes of freedom struggle fought for: Shashi Tharoor pic.twitter.com/RYjtbBYQzl
— ANI (@ANI) July 11, 2018
As his comments sparked a big row and invited condemnation from the ruling BJP, Tharoor put up a clarification, saying that his statement has been “bizarrely misconstrued.”
“I have said this before and I will say it again. Pakistan was created as a state with a dominant religion, that discriminates against its minorities and denies them equal rights. India never accepted the logic that had partitioned the country. But the BJP/RSS idea of a Hindu Rashtra is the mirror image of Pakistan -- a state with a dominant majority religion that seeks to put its minorities in a subordinate place. That would be a Hindu Pakistan, and it is not what our freedom movement fought for, nor the idea of India enshrined in our Constitution,” Tharoor wrote in a Facebook post, on Thursday.
The BJP, meanwhile, has lashed out at the Congress MP and demanded an apology from him.
“This is pure hallucination by Shashi Tharoor. I think this is withdrawal symptoms of the fact that neither they are in power nor do they see power coming to them again. It's Congress that has infringed our Constitution and freedom of our citizens,” Union Minister Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore told the media on Thursday.
“Rahul Gandhi must apologise for what Shashi Tharoor said. Congress was responsible for the creation of Pakistan because of its ambitions, and yet again, it has gone ahead to demean India and defame the Hindus of India,” BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra told ANI.