Aday after Congress’s star campaigner for the Uttar Pradesh election, RPN Singh, joined the Bharatiya Janata Party, senior leader of the party and Lok Sabha MP Shashi Tharoor took a dig at the BJP, saying that it was a party composed of Congress leaders.
Shashi Tharoor used the phrase, “Congress-yukt BJP (Congress (leaders)-laden BJP)”, a play on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s slogan of ‘Congress mukt Bharat’ or ‘Congress-free India’.
In a poetic tweet in Hindi, Tharoor said: “He is leaving his home, maybe he has dreams; Now everyone there is our own.”
Responding to his tweet, national spokesperson for Congress Pawan Khera said in a similar manner: “One who couldn’t be true to his ideology, cannot be our own.”
The ideology line has been adhered to by the Congress ever since RPN Singh quit the party to move to the BJP. On Tuesday, another National spokesperson of the Congress, Supriya Shrinate, said that only “cowards jump to parties with completely opposite ideology”. She called the fight between BJP and Congress a “war of ideology”. “To win this fight you have to be brave. Only a coward can jump to a party with a completely opposite ideology,” she had said.
Pawan Khera also advised Tharoor not to look for their “own people” and not to dream of the “other side (BJP)”.
He said that the people who divide the nation on 80:20 basis must be defeated. The comment was a clear allusion to UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s comment earlier this month that the UP Assembly election would be an “80% versus 20%” fight. Opposition leaders had alleged that the “80-20” reference was an attempt at polarisation. They said the comment was aimed to point out the ratio of Hindus to Muslims in Uttar Pradesh.
