Staff Reporter
Dimapur, July 10 (EMN): The NPF-led DAN government was on Monday accused of hitching its wagon to a BJP-RSS project whose candidate for the coming presidential elections has been alleged of saying: ‘Christians and Muslims are from other planets’.
The accusations were made by the All India Congress Committee secretary in charge of Nagaland, Dr K Jayakumar during a press conference here at Dimapur on Monday. He described the BJP presidential candidate Ram Nath Kovind as a ‘hardcore RSS pracharak (propagandist) who has ‘taken the oath in the RSS camp that he would abide by the legacy and the principles of RSS’.
The oath, according to Jayakumar, includes the promise that “in the event of objection to such implementation (of the RSS principles) he would not mind even to destroy his own society where he comes from, but stand with the RSS”.
Kovind had even told a press conference in 2010 that Christians and Muslims are from other planets, the Congress leader said. Even when the Ranganath Mishra Commission had recommended delinking of Scheduled Caste status from religion in 2009, the BJP’s presidential candidate had objected saying Scheduled Caste status should be conferred basing solely on faith/religion, he added.
“Why I am emphasising on this is because he is such a hardcore Hindu. My point is if he is elected as the president, when he takes oath on the Constitution of India, isn’t it an acting (pretence) or is it that he would stand by his conscience on the Constitution of India”, he questioned.
By choosing to pledge their unanimous support to such a candidate the NPF-led DAN legislators and members of Parliament were committing a ‘great sin by betraying the people of Nagaland who have voted those legislators and MPs to power’, Jayakumar said.
“They vote not because they are MLAs or MPs but because they are the direct representatives of the people. Therefore they should do what the people want,” he said while serving the reminder that even in the previous state elections, the people of Nagaland ‘have not voted for BJP’ but for NPF ‘by giving a resounding victory’.
Considering all these, he wondered, how could the chief minister of Nagaland Dr Shurhozelie Liezietsu describe the ‘RSS-supported BJP’ as a natural ally of the NPF? “Therefore I question Dr Shurhozelie, he should not keep quiet on my question and he should answer tomorrow itself”.
If the NPF was a natural ally of the BJP, he reasoned, it would mean that the former was also an ally of the RSS since the “BJP is the political wing of RSS, everybody knows about it”.
Citing ‘local conditions and circumstances’, he appealed the Nagaland legislators and MPs to let their votes reflect the ‘feeling and faith’ of the people who had voted for them. “Or least, they should vote based on their conscience, and not on the direction of the party. They need not be afraid, because for this election there is no whip”.
