New Delhi: Days after Mohan Bhagwat called Ram Mandir’s ‘Pran Pratishtha’ ceremony as ‘true independence of India’, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, on Wednesday, lashed out at the RSS chief for his remark and dubbed his comments as an ‘act of treason’. The Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha also claimed that for making such comments, the RSS chief could have faced arrest had it be in any other country. Gandhi made these comments at the inauguration event of Congress’ new headquarters in New Delhi.
He also urged people to “stop listening to the nonsense.” “He has the audacity to say this publicly, in any other country, he would be arrested and tried. To say that India did not get independence in 1947 is an insult to every single Indian person,” he said.
#WATCH | Delhi: Lok Sabha LoP and Congress MP Rahul Gandhi says “Mohan Bhagwat has the audacity to inform the nation every 2-3 days what he thinks about the independence movement, Constitution. What he said yesterday is treason because it is stating that the Constitution is… pic.twitter.com/9HbewOXglz
— ANI (@ANI) January 15, 2025
“Mohan Bhagwat has the audacity to inform the nation every 2-3 days what he thinks about the independent movement, Constitution. What he said yesterday is treason because it is stating that the Constitution is invalid, fight against the British was invalid,” said Gandhi.
Rahul continued his attack on RSS and said: “The people who are in power today don’t salute the tricolour… They have a completely different vision of India than we do. They want India to be run by a shady, secret society. They want to crush voice of Dalits, minorities, backward classes… There is no other party in this country that can stop them besides the Congress. Our ideology is thousands of years old and very different from that of the BJP and RSS.”
The Congress MP also accused the BJP and RSS of capturing all the institutions of the country.
What did Bhagwat say?
On Monday, Bhagwat said that the date of Ram temple consecration in Ayodhya should be celebrated as “Pratishtha Dwadashi”, as the “true independence” of India, which faced “parachakra” (enemy attack) for several centuries, was established on that day.
“After India got political independence from the British on August 15, 1947, a written Constitution was made according to the path shown by that specific vision, which comes out of the “self” of the country, but the document was not run according to the spirit of the vision at that time,” Bhagwat reportedly said.