Tharoor kicks up row with "Hindu Pak" jibe; BJP demands Rahul's apology while Cong cautions restraint by party leaders

Congress leader Shashi Tharoor set off a political controversy with his remarks that the BJP, if voted to power again, will rewrite the Constitution and pave the way for creation of a "Hindu Pakistan", prompting the ruling party today to demand an apology from Rahul Gandhi.

As the BJP demanded the apology from the Congress president for the "attack on Indian democracy and Hindus" by Tharoor, the Congress cautioned its leaders to exercise restraint and choose their words carefully while rejecting what it called the saffron party's "hatred".

Union Information and Broadcasting Minister Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore also assailed Tharoor, dubbing his remarks as "pure hallucination".

"If they have been able to win a repeat of their current strength in the Lok Sabha, then frankly, our own democratic Constitution, as we understand, will not survive... because then they will have all the three elements they need to tear up the Constitution of India and write a new one.

"And that will enshrine the principle of Hindu Rashtra, that will remove equality for the minorities, and that will create a Hindu Pakistan...and that is not what Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru, Sardar Patel, Maulana Azad and great heroes of freedom struggle fought for," the Lok Sabha MP from Thiruvananthapuram told an event in the Kerala state capital yesterday. Lok Sabha polls are due next year.

Unfazed by the controversy, a combative Tharoor took to Facebook today to defend his remarks, insisting that the BJP and RSS' idea of a Hindu Rashtra was the "mirror image" of Pakistan.

Defending himself, he told TV channels that he was repeating what is on record from the ruling party and its ideological mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak SanghRSS).

I don't see what exactly I need to apologise for the BJP's point of view ... If they are no longer interested in the idea of Hindu Rashtra they must admit. Until they do so, how can one apologise for reflecting their point accurately?" he said.

A livid BJP hit out at Tharoor with party spokesman Sambit Patra calling it "extraordinary" as it was an "attack on the Indian democracy and Hindus".

"Yet again Tharoor has cattle-classed Indian democracy. The Congress' character is that it crosses the 'Lakshman Rekha' (limit) in its hatred for Narendra Modi and the BJP, and in doing so, it assaults Indian democracy," he told reporters in Delhi.

"It is shameful to denigrate one's own country, one's own country's democracy, to denigrate the Hindu religion time and again.

"This is a shameful act for which Rahul Gandhi should come out and not only apologise but explain to us why any leader of that party, whenever they open their mouth, they speak this way," he said.

Tharoor had courted a controversy a few years ago when he was a minister at the Centre with his comment on Twitter that he would travel "cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows."
Congress's communication in-charge Randeep Surjewala, in a series of tweets, said, "India's values and fundamentals are an unequivocal guarantee of our civilisational role & set us apart from the divisive idea of Pakistan."
"But the BJP/RSS idea of a Hindu Rashtra is the mirror image of Pakistan a state with a dominant majority religion that seeks to put its minorities in a subordinate place. That would be a Hindu Pakistan, and it is not what our freedom movement fought for, nor the idea of India enshrined in our Constitution."