Thakre Reiterates Commitment To Hindutva
Kushabhau Thakre, yesterday became the fourth president of the Bharatiya Janata Party. He took over charge from outgoing president Lal Krishna Advani among chanting of vedic mantras at the partys national council meeting at Gandhinagar.
The new presidents duty was outlined by Advani in his farewell speech in which he said that Thakre was the organisational man and hence best suited to strengthen the organisation when the party was in power at the Centre.
In his presidential address the new president pledged the partys commitment to Hindutva.
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The BJP, which is the inheritor of the legacy of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, owes its birth to the idea of nationalism. This is the core of our ideology; for us India is one nation, one people and one culture, he said. Thakre, elected unanimously to the post, added that notwithstanding diversities like region, religion, caste and language, India has evolved a common way of life rooted in a shared cultural heritage.
It is this common way of life which is unique to India that we call Hindutva or cultural nationalism. You could call it by any other name, Indianness or Bharatiyata, but the core remains the same.
Rejecting criticism that cultural nationalism was being exclusive and communal, Thakre said Hindutva by definition was an all-inclusive concept and was in perfect harmony with the true meaning of secularism. It means justice for all citizens. And it is this inherent strength of Hindutva that has helped check the vote-bank politics of the pseudo-secularists, he said.
Rejecting the charge that BJP was not its own master but remote-controlled by the RSS, Thakre said it was a motivated canard and a travesty of objective truth and subjective reality. As a matter of fact all organisations inspired by the RSS are free to take their own decisions. This is because the very idea of centralised control is non-Hindu, he said.
Claiming that BJP today had more friends than any other party, he said it reflected its increasing acceptability among the people and the political class.