New Delhi: Congress General Secretary Jairam Ramesh on Monday took a pot shot at Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “appeasement” charges against India’s first Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru during the day-long ‘Vande Mataram’ debate in Lok Sabha on Monday while describing his as “the master distorian”.
In a post on X, Jairam Ramesh, who is also a Rajya Sabha member and party’s communication in-charge said, “The Master Distorian has repeated his insult of Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore today in Parliament.”
Ramesh in another post said, “Here are pages 110-112 from vol 4 of the authoritative biography in Bengali of Rabindranath Tagore titled Rabindra-Jeebanee by Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay, published by Visva-Bharati in 1994. The Master Distorian of a PM must render an apology. He has insulted our founding fathers and most of all Tagore himself.”..
He also attached the pages of the biography to support his claims.
While slamming the Prime Minister, the Congress leader said, “Nehru is being accused of appeasement. But will the PM–the Master Distorian– answer:
“Which Indian leader formed a coalition in Bengal in the early 1940s with the person who moved the Pakistan resolution in Lahore in March 1940? It was Syama Prasad Mookerjee.
“Which Indian leader applauded Jinnah in Karachi in June 2005? It was LK Advani. Which Indian leader praised Jinnah in his book 2009? It was Jaswant Singh,” he wrote.
Prime Minister Modi during the discussion on ‘Vande Matram’ accused Nehru of agreeing to Muslim Leagues’s demands that “‘Vande Mataram’s background in the Anand Matth can irritate Muslims.”
Modi said: The Muslim League had started to strongly oppose Vande Mataram. Muhammad Ali Jinnah raised a slogan against Vande Mataram on 15 October 1937 from Lucknow…
Despite giving a strong and befitting reply to the Muslim League’s baseless statements, Nehru started investigating Vande Mataram. Five days after this, Nehru wrote a letter to Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose mentioning that he agrees with the feeling of Mohammad Ali Jinnah and wrote, ‘Vande Mataram’s background in the Anand Matth can irritate Muslims’,” Modi said.
“The CWC decided to inspect Vande Mataram. Nationalists across the country took out prabhat pheris against this. But, unfortunately, the Congress surrendered before the Muslim League and partitioned Vande Mataram. This was part of the appeasement politics of the Congress,” the Prime Minister alleged, adding that this mentality led to the Partition.
