The Congress on Saturday hit back at Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh for accusing the previous UPA government of coining the term ‘Hindu terror’. It said the BJP was raking up the issue to polarise the country on communal lines.

Addressing a press conference here, Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad accused Singh of making deliberate attempts to divide the country and use the forum in Parliament to malign the Congress party. “The BJP need not lecture us on terrorism. Our leaders Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and Beant Singh had made the supreme sacrifice for the nation,” Azad said.

The BJP, however, showed no signs of slowing down. It repelled the Congress accusations, claiming even vice-president Rahul Gandhi had used the phrase in conversation with a former US ambassador.

“Congress party has not learnt right lessons (from these sacrifices). Had it done so, its flip-flop on terrorism would not have been there,” Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said.

The term ‘Hindu terror’ was used by former Union home minister Sushilkumar Shinde in his address to a Congress party convention in Jaipur in January 2013. P Chidambaram, who had preceded Shinde as the Union home minister, defended the former saying he had not used the phrase ‘Hindu terror’ in the manner in which it was referred to by Rajnath Singh in Parliament on Friday. “He (Shinde) was referring to right-wing extremist groups who had been implicated and some of them charged in several bomb blast cases,” Chidambaram said.
Shinde also said he had never used the words ‘Hindu terror’ inside the Parliament. He admitted that he had used the phrase while addressing a party meeting but had later withdrawn his remarks.