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.
Former Congress member of parliament Sandeep Dikshit charged the BJP with creating an atmosphere of hatred over the past 10 years and playing divisive politics.
“It is the duty of the opposition to make people aware of the dangers to national politics. The BJP targeted Rahul Gandhi when he went to attend a marriage ceremony in the family of former Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif, who was enjoying the swing with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Pakistan pushes terrorism in India and China has forcibly taken over the borderland,” Dikshit told ETV Bharat.
“Our former prime ministers laid their lives down for national integration. Now, threatening Rahul Gandhi is a negative politics. This must be condemned. The BJP was reduced to 240 seats in the Lok Sabha instead of their claim of 400 seats and now they are targeting Rahul Gandhi in frustration,” he said.
Bajwa said Congress had been expressing concern over the potential rise of the dark days of militancy in Punjab and wondered if the BJP was truly the well-wisher of the Sikhs.
“They brought three anti-farmer laws and then withdrew them when thousands of farmers protested at Delhi’s borders. They called the protesting farmers terrorists and separatists and have not implemented the promise of legal MSP till date,” he added.
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