Constitution and Deen Dayal Upadhyay cannot go together : Shashi Tharoor to PM Modi

Constitution and Deen Dayal Upadhyay cannot go together: Shashi Tharoor to PM Modi

Taking a dig at Narendra Modi, politician-writer Shashi Tharoor has said that while the Prime Minister describes the country’s Constitution as “holy”, he also hails Hindutva icon Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyay as a “hero”, and asserted that the two stands cannot go hand in hand.

Speaking at the ongoing Jaipur Literature Festival, the 61-year-old Member of Parliament said there was a dire need for Hindus to stand up and recognise what was being done “in their name” and speak out against it.

“We need to call a spade a spade. We are living in a country where on the one hand the Prime Minister says the Constitution is his holy book and on the other hand he extols as a hero and instructs his ministries to study the works, writings and teachings of Deen Dayal Upadhyay, who explicitly rejects the Constitution and who shares that the Constitution is fundamentally flawed,” Shashi Tharoor said.

Tharoor said Upadhyay believed the Constitution “rests on the flawed premise that the nation is a territory of India and all the people on it”.

“Whereas he (Upadhyay) says that is not correct, the nation is not a territory, it is a people and it is therefore the Hindu people. Which means you need a Hindu nation, a Hindu rashtra and that is what the Constitution should reflect, which of course it does not,” he said.

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That, Tharoor added, was the essential contradiction.

“(You) cannot hail Upadhyay and the Constitution … at the same time,” he said.

The Thiruvananthapuram MP described himself as a “devotee” of Swami Vivekananda’s teachings, and said the acceptance of differences was at the heart of Hinduism.

“Hinduism is not a faith of absolute certitudes… How such a wonderfully capacious faith so open, so classically liberal in that sense can be reduced by some into a badge of identity akin to that of a British hooligan, reducing our wonderful metaphysics to a chauvinistic rampage I don’t know,” he said.

The time had come, he said, to take Hinduism back to the “real” Hindus.