BJP as target, Congress launches attack on RSS

The Congress has mounted a spirited offensive on the BJP’s Achilles’ heel: terror connections of some right-wing fringe organisations. It specifically targeted the RSS with which the BJP shares the umbilical cord.

The theme looked well-choreographed as all important aspects of the 83rd plenary session of the party — Sonia Gandhi’s speech, the party’s political resolution, and the intervention by the delegates — touched upon the subject. While all speakers targeted the BJP’s links with the RSS, Gandhi sought to do a balancing act.

“The Congress makes no distinction between the organisations of the majority and minority communities who indulge in communalism and related acts of terrorism. They are all dangerous, they must all be defeated,” she said. But her observations did not leave any doubt about the RSS being the prime target.

“We cannot ignore the pernicious impact of individuals, institutions and ideologies that distort our history, thrive on spreading religious prejudice and that incite people to violence using religion as a cover,” she said.  

The attack on the RSS was sharpened in the political resolution moved by Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee. “The role of religious organisations in challenging the security of the nation can no longer be ignored. The Indian National Congress calls upon the government to tackle this menace in the strongest possible manner and investigate the links between the terrorists and the RSS and its sister organisations that have been uncovered in some recent cases,” it said.

Seconding this resolution, Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh, who has now emerged as the party’s consistent voice against the RSS, targeted senior BJP leader LK Advani for the rise of communalism in the 90s.

“I have always maintained that it was Advani’s rath yatra in the 1990s that sowed the seeds of the communal divide in the country. It has provoked acts of communal violence by the majority as well as the minority community,” he said.

“There used to be a formulation by the BJP and its supporters that all Muslims are not terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims. Now I put it to them that all Hindus are not terrorists, but how come all Hindu terrorists have an RSS link?” he said.

Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi, who was expected to speak his mind in the backdrop of the recent WikiLeaks expose, which quoted him as saying that the Hindu terrorists presented a bigger threat to the nation’s security, skipped the issue.