Don't lecture us on nationalism: Yechury tells Govt.

Communist Party of India (Marxist) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury on Thursday said that they were not for the breaking of this country and, therefore, asked the BJP-led Government not to lecture them on the same.

"Nobody can be for breaking up of country. Don't give us lectures on that. We fight and continue to fight. If there is an organisation, what was the intelligence doing? Why was the event allowed to function?" Yechury said while replying to Union Finance Minister ARUN during the debate on nationalism and JNU row in the Rajya Sabha

"If I don't support them you say I should go to Pakistan. Either I am 'Ramzada' or 'haramzada', are they not slogans?" he added.

The Finance Minister earlier participating in the debate on the third day of the Budget Session said, "The core question is, are we going to give respectability to those whose primary ideology is that they want to break this country?"

"Can anybody say that their (Maqbool Bhat and Afzal Guru) martyrdom should be celebrated? Let us be very clear about the kind of functions that was organised in HCU and JNU," he added.

Jaitley further said the support to the February 9 event in the JNU campus was directly or indirectly adding respectability to the movement, which was a charter to break this country to pieces.

"The tragedy of February 9 is not only that slogans were raised. The tragedy is that how can national parties say that these arrests are bad and police should not enter? They are directly or indirectly adding respectability to the movement which was a charter to break this country to pieces," he said.

Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha, Ghulam Nabi Azad, earlier demanded stringent punishment for those involved in the JNU campus row, adding that no no innocent should be punished.

"People who have not committed any crime should not be punished. Don't level allegations on wrong people. The government should go behind those, who have through a video, tried to polarise the nation," Azad said.

The Congress leader asserted that there should be a debate on 'nationalism' in the Parliament for a week so that the issue is dealt with once and for all.

"The question is not who is nationalist and who is not; if that is argued then the country is fighting within itself anyway," he said.