Raghuvanshi: appropriating Gandhi will not help Hindu extremists win elections
New Delhi (AsiaNews) - The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India's main Hindu nationalist opposition party, is playing the Mahatma Gandhi and military cards as it prepares for this year's parliamentary election, this according to Lenin Raghuvanshi.
Speaking to AsiaNews, the secretary general of the People's Vigilance Committee on Human Rights (PVCHR) said that this strategy is "doomed to fail. There is no chance that the BJP can win this election."
Recently, the Swayamesvak Rashtriya Sangh (RSS), a Hindu extremist paramilitary association that supports the BJP, has claimed the Mahatma as its own, to the point that it attacked Rahul Gandhi, head of the Congress Party's election campaign, for saying that the RSS had plotted Gandhi's assassination in 1948.
The RSS and its militants appear to be trying to "clean up" their image, tarnished by a past full of violence against India's social, ethnic and religious minorities.
Still, they "have nothing to do with Gandhi," Raghuvanshi told AsiaNews, because "the Mahatma believed in nonviolence, harmony among different communities, and, although a Hindu, he was a liberal who fought for the creation of a secular nation".
By contrast, "the RSS was created in 1925 with the idea of turning India into a Hindu nation," and "has always used religion for political purposes, which is contrary to Gandhi's views and values," the PPVCHR leader said
Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, India's first Home Affairs minister, knew this, Raghuvanshi said, even if Narendra Modi and the BJP want to turn him into a symbol for their cause.
In fact, Patel never supported the RSS and its positions to the point that he banned the organisation in 1948, after one of their members, Nathuram Godse, assassinated Gandhi.
That year, on two separate occasions, the minister expressed his fears concerning RSS militants, whose activities, "acts of violence, including arson, theft and murder," constituted "a clear threat to the existence of the government and the State."
Some analysts have also noted a growing "link" between the BJP and the military. In early March, the decision by General VK Singh, a former Chief of Army Staff of the Indian Army, to join the party caused a sensation. This is an unprecedented move since none of his predecessors has ever entered politics so openly."
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