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Nehru with Edwina |
New Delhi, Dec. 5: Hear it from the Sangh’s mouth: Jawaharlal Nehru’s “moments of weakness” with Edwina Mountbatten were to blame for India’s Partition.
“Edwina aise kshan mein ye batein karti ki Nehru ke paas mana karne ki taaqat nahin rah jaati (Edwina would ask for favours at such moments when Nehru could not refuse her),” the RSS chief, K.S. Sudarshan declared, as his audience of Sangh and BJP workers tittered.
“Edwina had almost captured Nehru with her charms,” he added.
Sangh pracharaks have to take a lifelong vow of celibacy, but they can’t be grudged a giggle or two about the private lives of others.
The Mountbattens had a troubled marriage, the RSS chief continued. “Dono ne apne apne yaar bana rakhe the (Both had their separate partners),” he said, in words taken out of C-grade films.
Yet, Sudarshan claimed, Edwina would make the Indian Prime Minister do her husband’s bidding.
Murli Manohar Joshi, education minister in the previous BJP government, was on the dais with Sudarshan.
Nehru’s relationship with Edwina, wife of the last Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten, is in the public domain and has been freely spoken and written about. The Mountbattens’ daughter, too, wrote about it recently.
Sudarshan, however, found an unusual platform to talk about it: the release of a book that tries to establish that Subhas Chandra Bose had lived as Gumnami Baba in Faizabad till he died in 1985.
The book’s author, Shakti Singh, is the grandson of the person in whose house Gumnami Baba lived. He used to talk from behind a screen and only meet select individuals.
Sudarshan also refused to acknowledge India’s freedom, terming it alms given to the Congress by the British, and repeated his regulation lecture on India’s rich spiritual and cultural heritage.
Congress spokesperson Veerappa Moily said: “His reaction is perverse and reflects the RSS attitude towards the nation’s pride and the heroes of the freedom movement. But we cannot expect any better from an organisation that sided with the British when the Congress was fighting for freedom.”