Apologise for backing 'anti-national' forces: BJP to Rahul

Back and forth: Cong leader had equated current situation with Hitler's Germany

As the war of words intensified over the JNU incident, BJP president Amit Shah has demanded an apology from Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi for supporting ‘anti-national forces’ in the country.

He also rebutted  Rahul’s  analogy that today's India is like Hitler’s Germany which is lack of right of dissent. “I ask Rahul Gandhi was 1975 (emergency) a demonstration of Congress’s commitment to democracy. Was Indira Gandhi not Hitler like?” Shah wrote on his blog. He also wondered whether Rahul by lending his voice to separatists in the country want another partition of the country.

Shah said Rahul is so frustrated with Modi government’s performance that he has forgotten difference between national interest and anti-national activities, which he said was evident from his visit to JNU and subsequent solidarity with students raising slogans eulogising terrorist Afzal Guru.

Following the controversy, JNU Students’ Union president Kanhaiya Kumar was arrested on charges of sedition by the Delhi Police which has snowballed into a major political slugfest.

Unmindful of the controversy following Hyderabad Dalit student Rohith Vemula’s suicide where the opposition had reservation over anti-national tag foisted on students raising similar Afzal Guru slogans, the BJP has taken aggressive nationalist stand on the JNU episode as it believes that agitation in the universities are a part of a larger conspiracy to unsettle the Modi government.

Defending Rahul stoutly, the Congress hit back at Shah, with its spokesperson Randeep Surjewal saying, “those once externed by the Supreme Court over criminal charges (in an encounter case)” should desist from teaching patriotism and love for India.

The Congress also took pot shots at the RSS and the regimes of Modi and Vajpayee. Surjewala, who  regretted slip of tongue by addressing ‘Afzal Guruji’ said that its was “distressing and condemnable” to find that “those who helped British and sided with them” in the freedom movement and whose parent organisation RSS did not hoist the National flag at its headquarters in Nagpur were teaching nationalism to Congress.