A Metropolitan Magistrate court in Kolkata has issued an arrest warrant against Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, for his remark on “Hindu Pakistan” in July last year
Kolkata: Congress leader and MP from Thiruvananthapuram Shashi Tharoor may have had a long fan following and won a lot of admirers for his speeches and diction, but on the contrary, he has earned the wrath of a court in Kolkata as it has issued an arrest warrant against him for an remark it considers incendiary.
The order comes in the wake of an advocate named Sumeet Chowdhary filing a case against the MP for his remark in July last year. A Metropolitan Magistrate court in Kolkata issued an arrest warrant against Tharoor.
Tharoor had said, “If they (BJP) win a repeat in the Lok Sabha our democratic constitution as we understand it will not survive as they will have all the elements they need to tear apart the constitution of India and write a new one. That new one will be the one which will enshrine principles of Hindu Rashtra, that will remove equality for minorities, that'll create a Hindu Pakistan and that isn't what Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru, Sardar Patel, Maulana Azad and great heroes of freedom struggle fought for."
This remark had certainly not gone down well with many as they objected to the usage of the words “Hindu Pakistan”.
The BJP said it has nothing do with the issue.
Sreenath Sheshadri, a BJP spokesperson said, “He has made a statement which is anti-Indian. People have gone to the court as they felt hurt. The BJP has nothing do with it. We have never talked about a Hindu rashtra. We have talked about the culture, not about Hinduism as a religion.”
Tharoor has always been a strident critic of the BJP and the purported Hindutva ideology it espouses.
He had even said once that he doesn’t believe that Hinduism and Hindutva are the same. He had also added that Hinduism is accommodative while Hindutva doesn’t and it isolates people of other religions.
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