New Delhi: A miffed Congress slammed the BJP for issuing life threats to the Leader of the Opposition (LoP) Rahul Gandhi and expressed concern over the lowering of democratic discourse by the ruling party.
A day after a BJP functionary, Tarvinder Singh Marwah, publicly threatened Rahul Gandhi that he would meet the same fate as his grandmother, former prime minister Indira Gandhi and his father former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, Congress insiders said they would protest the issue nationwide and take legal action against the saffron party leader.
“This is a very serious issue. A BJP member is issuing a direct threat to the country’s Leader of the Opposition. The central government is silent on this. The prime minister must answer. This is not good for democracy. It presents the country in a bad light internationally. It shows that if they can’t win through debate, they will threaten our leaders. We will protest across the country and lodge an FIR against the ruling party leader,” senior Congress leader and LoP in the Punjab legislative assembly Partap Singh Bajwa told ETV Bharat.
Ex-PM Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her Sikh security guards on October 31, 1984 in retaliation to an army operation–called Operation Blue Star –to flush out militants holed up in the Sikh religious shrine Harmandir Sahib in Punjab’s Amritsar.
The same fate awaited ex-PM Rajiv Gandhi who was blown up to pieces on May 21, 1991 by a female suicide bomber of the Sri Lankan militant group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Tamil Nadu’s Sriperumbudur.
The threat to Rahul, who is visiting the US, was given on September 11 over his recent remarks on the practice of religion by the Sikhs in the country that triggered a war of words between the Congress and the BJP, which accused the Congress leader of making anti-India statements on foreign soil.