NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is facing threats from within the Sangh Parivar whose leaders are making divisive statements like the one about Mother Teresa, and not from the Opposition, the Congress said on Wednesday.
In his speech on the motion of thanks to the President for his address to Parliament, Rajya Sabha Opposition leader Ghulam Nabi Azad looked at Modi sitting across the aisle and told him: “You don’t face a threat from us. You face a threat from within.”
“It’s difficult to fight a person from within one’s family. I can understand your difficulty,” he said.
He used the Hindi proverb “ghar ka bhedi, Lanka dhaye” which refers to family members bringing about Ravana’s downfall.
Azad was apparently referring to Sangh leaders’ statements about the “Ghar Wapsi” campaign and “love jihad” and the attacks on churches in the Capital. “These people have not even spared Mother Teresa,” Azad said, alluding to the remarks of RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s comment.
He further said the people of the country had voted for Modi, not others. “If you don’t put a restraint on them, it will also impact the implementation of your development schemes,” he said.
Again without naming anyone, he pointed out that the RSS chief had asked all Hindus to unite “for reviving their past glory”.
“Tomorrow somebody could stand and say that Muslims had been rulers for seven hundred years and they should unite for past glory while Buddhists could start speaking of the reign of Ashoka. Christians could say that British had ruled this land for 200 years,” he said.
He said those calling for the revival of “past glory” should look at how it had destroyed some Muslim countries and communities which are fighting among themselves in the name of “past glory”.
“This is the land of Buddha, Vivekananda, Gandhi, Bhagat Singh ... What is happening?” Azad said and asked Modi if he could stop those organisations “which are close to him”.
He concluded his speech with an Urdu couplet by Shakeel Badayuni which means: “My intentions are so high that I am not afraid of the unknown blaze, I am afraid of the fire of the flowers lest it burn the garden.”
Vatican Bishops not denied visa
New Delhi: The MEA said that India did not deny visa to two Catholic bishops from Vatican, but that they had withdrawn their passports themselves after they did not complete necessary documentation. In a reply to the LS, MoS for External Affairs V K Singh said that the two Vatican bishops had applied to the Indian Embassy in Rome on January 20, even though Vatican is accredited to Berne. He said that the prescribed processing time for visa applications from third countries was longer than for applications from the same or accredited countries and conference visas had to be processed as per prescribed guidelines.