The Christmas spirit seemed in short supply as Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday asserted the BJP had freed the country from “bondage” to “only one family”, taking yet another swipe at the Nehru-Gandhis.
“We shouldn’t forget the tendency that prevailed to credit just one family with every good thing done in the country after independence,” Modi said during a visit to Lucknow.
“Whether books (writers), government schemes or government institutions, they used to glorify only one family. There would be their names and statues alone…. The BJP has brought the country out of this bondage.”
During the Vande Mataram debate in Parliament this month, Congress MP Priyanka Gandhi Vadra had urged the government benches to list all their insults for Jawaharlal Nehru, schedule a debate on the subject, and close the chapter “once and for all”.
Modi was addressing RSS and BJP workers at the 65-acre Rashtriya Prerana Sthal
after inaugurating the memorial site, which includes a
museum.
He unveiled 63-foot bronze statues of late Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee — on his 101st birth anniversary — as well as Jana Sangh founder Syama Prasad Mookerjee and ideologue Deendayal Upadhyaya on the premises. The three statues cost ₹21 crore.
The ₹232-crore museum narrates the history of the RSS and these three leaders through pictures and audio-visual shows. It displays a Mother India sculpture, a lamp (the Jana Sangh’s election symbol), and a model of the Sudarshan Chakra, a weapon wielded by Krishna. An auditorium and a cafeteria stand on the premises.
More than 40,000 RSS and BJP workers attended the event, most of them ferried in from across Uttar Pradesh in 2,000 buses.
“My government respects the contribution made by every leader,” the Prime Minister said, citing the statues to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose installed in New Delhi and
the Andamans.
“Nobody can forget how an effort was made to erase the legacy of Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar. The Congress’s royal family in Delhi committed this sin. The Samajwadi Party conducted the same misadventure in Uttar Pradesh. But the BJP didn’t let them wipe out Babasaheb’s legacy.”
Modi claimed his government had preserved whatever was associated with the Dalit emancipator. But his attacks on the Nehru-Gandhis continued.
“Dynasty politics has a distinct trait — they (dynasts) are full of insecurity. And so, it’s a compulsion with them to demean others so that their own statues look bigger and their businesses continue,” he said.
“This belief introduced political untouchability to India…. India had many (non-Nehru-Gandhi) Prime Ministers but the museum in Delhi ignored them. The BJP and the NDA changed this situation.”
Modi cited how he had renamed the Nehru Memorial Museum in New Delhi as the Prime Ministers’ Memorial Museum, which now recognises every Indian Prime Minister.
“The Congress and its allies treated the BJP as untouchables, but the BJP’s culture is to respect all,” he said.
Days earlier, the Modi government had dropped Mahatma Gandhi’s name from a rural employment guarantee regime enacted by the UPA and restyled it as VB-G RAM G.
Modi claimed that while only 25 crore Indians had social security coverage before 2014, the year he became Prime Minister, his government had raised the number to 95 crore.