Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh had chided the home minister for being intellectually arrogant.
Union home minister P Chidambaram seems to have got on the wrong side of another senior Congress leader. A few months back, Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh had chided the home minister for being intellectually arrogant.
On Friday, Janardan Dwivedi ticked off Chidambaram for using the word “saffron terror”.
Dwivedi, a Rajya Sabha member and the party’s chief spokesperson, had to go on damage control after the opposition targeted Chidambaram in Rajya Sabha for his remarks on saffron terrorism at a conference of police chiefs in Delhi.
Talking to reporters, Dwivedi said, “As for saffron or bhagwa or kesariya (other words for saffron) it was not an issue then. The issue was terrorism. Terrorism does not have colour. Terrorism has only one colour and it is black.”
The Congress general secretary was worried about the impact of linking saffron and terror. “Terrorism is terrorism and it should be opposed regardless of the form it appears in.
The colour saffron has been part our tradition and is associated with our freedom struggle. No particular section of society has a sole right on it,” he said.
Dwivedi’s comments are part of a course correction for the Congress party. On Thursday, party spokesperson Manish Tewari had defended Chidambaram’s use of the word and said the BJP’s objection to his statement was a case of “guilty conscience”. Even as his party pulled him up outside parliament, Chidambaram faced the anger of BJP and Shiv Sena members who disrupted Question Hour in Rajya Sabha on the same issue and forced two adjournments. Leader of opposition Arun Jaitley charged that the home minister had failed to come up with a strategy to solve the problems in Jammu and Kashmir and Maoist-dominated states.” He’s creating an imaginary problem,” Jaitley said.
Chidambaram stuck to his position. “All I have said is part of a written statement, and it stands,” he told reporters.
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