BJP supporters scrolling down the party’s Twitter timeline this morning may have set down their coffee cups sharply in alarm. One post read: “Nehru is the sole reason why humanity exists.”
But a moment’s pause (and a glance at the winking smiley) would have sufficed to reassure them that this was little more than a sarcastic barb — one aimed at Shashi Tharoor, the Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram.
Yesterday, on the eve of Nehru’s birthday, Tharoor mentioned Prime Minister Narendra Modi while praising the great Congressman. “If today we have a chaiwala as prime minister,” he said, “it is because Nehru ji made it possible to create the institutional structures through which any Indian can aspire to rise to the highest office in the land.”
It was part of this excerpt that the BJP attached to its tweet. “Minor correction, Dr Tharoor,” it wrote. Then came the jibe about Nehru and humanity, followed by: “Don’t trivialise his role to mundane matters like making prime ministers and all that.”
Minor correction Dr. Tharoor, Nehru is the sole reason why humanity exists. Don’t trivialise his role to mundane matters like making Prime Ministers and all that 😉 pic.twitter.com/bRR7JO9XuC
— BJP (@BJP4India) November 14, 2018
Tharoor is the author of Nehru: The Invention of India. Yesterday, he asked why there was a desire to undermine the former prime minister — a “great son of India” — and decried a “consorted campaign of vilification”.
Sonia Gandhi, the chairperson of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), the national coalition led by the Congress, said the Nehruvian legacy was being “undermined daily” by those currently in power.
“They express disdain and contempt for Nehru for all that he did to build the India they are bent upon changing for the worse,” she said.
Her son Rahul Gandhiis Nehru’s great-grandson and the Congress’s current president. His father and grandmother, Rajiv and Indira Gandhi, are former prime ministers.
