Rahul Gandhi

New Delhi, April 21: Attention, billion-strong Indians, you just got a prince.

A Congress MP today sparked an uproar in Parliament after he called Rahul Gandhi a “yuvraj” (prince) of the common man, setting off protests from the Opposition which said such descriptions were a blot on democracy and “unacceptable”.

“If there is a yuvraj, there has to be (a) rajmata and a maharaja,” retorted BJP leader Balbir Punj, who took the floor after Congress Rajya Sabha member E.M. Sudarsana Natchiappan hailed Rahul as a people’s prince.

“It is hard to perceive that the salvation of the country depends on one family,” Punj said.

Even CPM MP Brinda Karat, whose party backs the Congress at the Centre, objected to the term though she didn’t take any name.

She said in the recent Nepal polls, people had voted the monarchy out and a democratic government had come to power.

“The raja and maharaja have been shown the door,” she said. “In this context how far is it valid to use the term yuvraj?”

The ruckus, in the middle of a discussion initiated by Karat on the functioning of the rural development ministry, came less than a week after the Congress had snuffed out an attempt by party veterans Arjun Singh and Pranab Mukherjee to pitch Rahul as candidate for Prime Minister in 2009.

A stiff message vetted by party chief Sonia Gandhi had praised Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for his “magnificent record of performance”. The subtext was he was not to be destabilised.

Today, Natchiappan said Rahul had proved himself to be a “yuvraj” of the people and of his party by marching to the divisional commissioner’s office in Jhansi to know why people were being deprived of their right to jobs under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme.

When Punj said it had to be a “joke” that somebody was being referred to as yuvraj in a democratic country, vociferous Congress members shot back saying the BJP only had armchair politicians who paid lip service to poverty alleviation.

“Here is a young leader who dares to eat and sleep with the underprivileged to espouse their cause,” they said, alluding to Rahul’s visit to Uttar Pradesh earlier this year when he spent a night with a Dalit family.

“Does one remove rural poverty by marching to the divisional commissioner’s office?” Punj retorted. “It amounts to trivialising the issue of poverty.”

Minister of state for parliamentary affairs V. Narayansamy said in a democracy, people and members of Parliament had the right to march to the divisional commissioner’s office to take up people’s grievances.

“Don’t they have such rights?” he asked the BJP members.