Congress MP Shashi Tharoor has welcomed Kanhaiya Kumar to join the Congress party should he wish to. He had recently sparked up a controversy when he compared Kanhaiya to Bhagat Singh.
In an interview with CNN-IBN, Shashi said, “If he (Kanhaiya) were to come to our party, I see no reason why he wouldn’t be welcomed, but he has got another political affiliation,” Tharoor said at the interview.
The Congress MP had strong opinions on the ongoing nationalism debate in the country. He said, “Who has made nationalism into an issue in politics today. It has been a very clear political strategy of our friends in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). They have decided that they are going to appropriate nationalist mantle and depict their critics and opponents as anti-nationals. To my mind this is an extremely dangerous territory of any party in a democracy, and especially the ruling party in a democracy to go on.”
“The ruling party is not the government and the government is not nation,” he added.
“Everybody who swears by the constitution is as much a nationalist as everybody else is. Therefore, for the BJP to create acid test for nationalism and to be a true nationalist you have to say ‘Bharat Mata ki jai’, believe in certain Hindutva political beliefs or would have to move to Pakistan, is a kind of rhetoric which is unnecessary divisible,” Tharoor asserted when asked whether Congress or BJP was the biggest nationalist party.
Kanhaiya Kumar had met with the Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday—this was their first meeting since the former was released on bail. Rahul Gandhi had earlier come out in full support of Kanhaiya amidst the unrest in JNU.
