Workers of the Bharatiya Janata Party Yuva Morcha on Monday protested outside Congress MP Shashi Tharoor’s office in Thiruvananthapuram. The workers poured black oil on Tharoor’s office during a demonstration against his remarks that India would turn into a Hindu Pakistan if the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government returned to power at the Centre in 2019.
The police have registered a case against unidentified people, Hindustan Times reported.
The protestors placed a banner saying “Hindu Pakistan office” outside Tharoor’s office and then struck out “Hindu”. They also laid a wreath at the entrance and demanded that Tharoor leave the country.
Tharoor was at Thiruvananthapuram’s Technopark on Monday, addressing trainees of the Tata Consultancy Services, his Twitter account said.
The Thiruvanathapuram MP said the protestors scared away people who had come to discuss their concerns with his office staff, ANI reported. “Is this what we want in our country,” Tharoor asked reporters after the attack. “I am asking as a citizen, not as an MP. This is not the Hinduism that I know of.”
BJP Thiruvananthapuram district president S Suresh justified the Yuva Morcha workers’ actions. “Workers have every right to vent their anger if they are provoked with such irresponsible statements,” the local BJP leader told Hindustan Times.
The state Congress condemned the protest. “It is a dastardly attack. It exposed the real face of the BJP,” said state Opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala.
The controversial statement
“If the BJP wins the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, 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,” the Thiruvananthapuram MP said on July 11. “That new one will be the one which will enshrine principles of Hindu Rashtra, that will remove equality for minorities, that will create a Hindu Pakistan and that is not what Mahatama Gandhi, Nehru, Sardar Patel, Maulana Azad and great heroes of freedom struggle fought for.”
A Kolkata court has summoned Tharoor on August 14 in connection with the comment.
Later, he wrote on Facebook that the BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s idea of a Hindu Rashtra is a “mirror image of Pakistan – a state with a dominant majority religion that seeks to put its minorities in a subordinate place”.
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