KOCHI: India must be a defendant against the hegemony and homogeneous religious and cultural ideology even as the RSS is trying to implement Hindutva which it imagined in 1925 in 2025, said Angomcha Bimol Akoijam, Congress MP from Inner Manipur, here on Sunday.
“As a political community and a state, India was born in 1947, bringing together different states. We declared that we, the people of India, would form this secular, republic and democratic country. When Rahulji said India is a union of states, he was acknowledging this. What do the RSS and the BJP do? The RSS is trying to implement what they imagined in 1925, in 2025, that is Hindutva,” said Akoijam, a former associate professor at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University.
He was speaking at the ‘Manipur Memoirs’ organised by the Ernakulam District Congress Committee.
“Last time during the election, everyone was running for BJP tickets, and this time, the BJP tickets are running behind people, and people are running away from them,” he said.
The Manipur MP also shared his experience of contesting the general election held this year and the attempts to prevent him from contesting. “They tried everything to defeat me. But they could not. I am not the one who won the election. The people of my state have won the election against divisive, sectarian, and polarising politics. People reject the kind of politics the BJP has. In my talks, I have said that we must throw out this party. The BJP must be eliminated. And we will work towards it,” he added.
Criticising the Union government for its silence on the Manipur issue, Akoijam said that the BJP government was allowing the violence to continue in the state, and the majority-minority issues and the divisive ideology have resulted in innocent people across communities suffering. “I am thankful that the PM visited Kerala after the landslides, Odisha, where the train accident occurred, and even Ukraine. But he has not visited Manipur. The so-called ‘double engine Sarkar’ is allowing this to happen in our state, not for a week or a month, but for more than 15 months now,” he said, adding that Manipur is an excluded state.