Rahul will visit a temple, a church and a shrine; his itinerary seems to have been designed to re-affirm syncretism in the political ideology of Congress party.
New Delhi: Congress president Rahul Gandhi will visit a temple, a church and a shrine in Karnataka Tuesday evening, a move that seems to be aimed at silencing his political adversaries who see in his temple visits an attempt to play ‘soft Hindutva’.
This comes two days after the Nehru-Gandhi scion, who recently proclaimed himself to be a “Shiv bhakt (devotee of Shiva)”, said at the Congress party’s plenary session in New Delhi that it was “strange” that people talked so much about his recent visits to temples in Gujarat. He claimed he visited temples for years before the Gujarat elections.
“I don’t go to temples only. I go to mosques, gurdwaras and churches. Whenever someone calls me, I go,” he told the All India Congress Committee delegates Sunday.
The Congress president will arrive in Mangaluru Tuesday and spend three hours visiting Rosario Church, Gokarnanatheshwara temple — Gokarnath is a form of Shiva — and Ullal Dargah, the shrine of Sayyid Muhammed Shareeful Madani who was believed to have come to Mangaluru from Saudi Arabia 500 years ago, floating across the sea on a piece of cloth.
Gandhi’s itinerary in Mangaluru, it seems, is designed to re-affirm syncretism in the political ideology of the grand old party, which, as former Congress president Sonia Gandhi recently claimed, was projected as a Muslim party by the BJP. After the party’s debacle in the 2014 general elections, senior leader A.K. Antony had concluded that the party had suffered due to public perception about the Congress indulging in minority appeasement, an assessment that apparently forced the party leadership to go for course correction.
Gandhi’s visit to temples in poll-bound Karnataka has drawn criticism from the BJP. After he visited the Kanakachala Laxmi-Narasimha temple in Koppal district last month, B.S. Yeddyurappa, the BJP’s chief ministerial candidate, took a jibe at him in a tweet: “There is Election Hindu @OfficeOfRG who took darshan of Narasimha swamy after eating Javari chicken.”
Hindus constitute 84 per cent of the population in Karnataka. The Congress has accused the BJP of trying to polarise voters on communal lines to gain political dividends.
While the political debate on the real motive of Gandhi’s temple visits was on, Congress leader Shashi Tharoor offered his own perspective recently, saying that now that leaders from both the Congress and the BJP go to temples, it is a level playing field. “Now that it’s established both go to temples, let’s talk about other issues like the economy,” Tharoor said at the launch of P. Chidambaram’s book Speaking Truth to Power this January.
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