Swami Vivekananda deliberately secularised, says Tejasvi Surya

Surya said that the saffron party will form a government in Tamil Nadu in the next ten years

BJP MP Tejasvi Surya on Monday said the identity of Swami Vivekananda has been “hijacked” and “deliberately secularised”, linking this to how kids end up wearing t-shirts of Cuban military leader Che Guevara for being a youth icon.

Surya was speaking at the valedictory of a week-long Twitter Spaces discussion on Vivekananda hosted by the BJP Yuva Morcha.

“Many of our icons have been hijacked for vested interests. Ambedkar is an example of this. Vivekananda has been secularised so much that his identity ends with his quote, ‘Arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached’,” Surya, the Bangalore South MP, said.

“Vivekananda is portrayed more like a management coach. This has been a very strong attempt all these years with Ambedkar, Aurobindo, the selective quoting of Gandhi. But, the country’s population is slowly coming out of this amnesia,” he said.

“Instead of Vivekananda, Che Guevara is presented as a youth icon. Kids wear his t-shirts without knowing the genocide he supported,” Surya, the Yuva Morcha national president, said.

To a question on including the Hindu monk in curriculum, Surya said nothing stops people from accessing the works of Vivekananda, Savarkar, Aurobindo and the likes. “There’s a sense of intellectual laziness in this country that was deliberately created,” he said.

Surya scoffed at attempts to secularise Vivekananda so as to suppress how he was the first proponent of Hindutva.

The BJP leader quoted Vivekananda on the importance of reason, which he said is the answer to all acts of fanaticism. Nothing can compare with relying on something as old as human reason than depending on a religious book to justify fanatic actions, Surya said while quoting Vivekananda.

To a question on religious unity, Surya pointed at Vivekananda’s idea of Advaita Vedanta. “Advaita means there’s no two; just one. That’s the core message of Bharatiya Chintan (thought). When there can’t be two and there’s only one entity, how can there be any difference? It sees the absolute unity in divinity in all beings. Man and woman, Vivekananda says there’s no difference. Likewise with religion, rich-poor and so on,” he said.

‘BJP-led govt in Tamil Nadu’

When a BJP IT Cell member asked him a question on Tamil Nadu, Surya said that the saffron party will form a government in the southern state in the next ten years. “In less than ten years, we will see a BJP-led nationalist government in Tamil Nadu that will represent the nationalist sentiments of the Tamil people,” he said.