NEW DELHI: The Congress Monday dubbed the BJP 'Bharatiya Jinnah Party' after the saffron party's Ratlam-Jhabua Lok Sabha candidate claimed that Partition could have been avoided had Jawaharlal Nehru allowed Muhammad Ali Jinnah to be prime minister.
Demanding Prime Minister Narendra Modi's apology over BJP candidate Guman Singh Damor's statement, Congress spokesperson Pawan Khera slammed Modi for going to Ratlam and campaign for the saffron party nominee on Monday.
Damor, in an election rally on Saturday in Ranapur town, Madhya Pradesh, said, "If (India's first prime minister) Nehru was not obstinate during the time of Independence, then this nation would not have been divided into two."
"Jinnah (the founder of Pakistan) was an advocate and a learned man. If a decision was taken to make Jinnah PM at the time, then India would not have been partitioned," he claimed.
At a press conference, Khera said, "Those who created furore over Jinnah's portrait in Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) are now campaigning for a person who praised Jinnah. Damor with his remarks has exposed the thinking of the BJP and the RSS."
"Damor hoped that Jinnah would have been the first prime minister. There can be two things. Either these people have become so blinded by their hatred against Nehru that they end up loving Jinnah, or they have become so blinded by their love for Jinnah that they end up hating Nehru," the Congress spokesperson said.
These are the same people who formed government with Fazlul Haq's Muslim League before Independence, Khera said, adding it was in the Sindh Assembly that the resolution supporting the two-nation theory was passed, but the Hindu Mahasabha did not pull out of government.
Syama Prasad Mookerjee was finance minister in Bengal with the Muslim League and V D Savarkar first talked about two nation theory, Khera said.
"Now Modi-ji is campaigning for his Jinnah-supporting candidate. Now it is becoming clear why Modi-ji invited Nawaz Sharif for his swearing-in, why he went to Pakistan uninvited and why Imran Khan wants them to come to power. This is the Bharatiya Jinnah Party," he said.
Khera also urged the prime minister, Amit Shah and "blog minister" Arun Jaitley to speak out on the issue.
"We condemn the statement. We demand an apology from the PM, Amit Shah, Arun Jaitley and all senior BJP leaders," he said.