NEW DELHI: BJP on Sunday lauded the Sikh student who questioned Rahul Gandhi over the massacre of Sikhs in 1984 and said it was telling that the Congress leader was being “ridiculed not just in India, but around the world”.
The student asked Rahul what attempts he was making to reconcile with the Sikh community and referred to the 1984 riots in his lengthy poser when the Congress MP was having an interaction session with students at Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University in the US on April 21. The video of the interaction was uploaded on Saturday on the Watson Institute’s YouTube channel.
BJP’s IT cell chief Amit Malviya shared a snippet of the video and said the student had directly reminded Rahul of the “unfounded fear-mongering” he had done about Sikh identity under BJP rule.
Questioning Rahul’s previous remarks on religious freedom under BJP rule, the Sikh student said, “You create fear among Sikhs about what BJP would look like. We want freedom of expression, which has not been allowed under the Congress in the past.”
The student also referred to the Anandpur Sahib resolution, which he claimed the Congress mis-characterized as a separatist manifesto. He criticized the party’s failure to reconcile with the Sikh community and pointed to convicted former Congress leader Sajjan Kumar as evidence of lingering impunity, and said, “Many more Sajjan Kumars are sitting in Congress party.”
In response, Rahul admitted that Congress had committed many “mistakes” when he was not there, but added that he was more than happy to take responsibility for everything the party had ever done wrong. He pointed out that he had publicly stated that what happened in the 1980s was “wrong”.
BJP also attacked Rahul for calling Lord Ram “a mythological figure” at the same interaction.