Citizenship is the soul of India, says Jaitley

NEWDELHI: Only if the former minister had cared to read what the Congress President’s view is, he would have saved his time and energy to write this entire fiction blog

PRIYANKA CHATURVEDI,

Congress spokesperson

Accusing the Congress and Trinamool Congress of allegedly compromising the sovereignty of India on the issue of Assam National Register of Citizens (NRC), Union minister Arun Jaitley on Wednesday said political leaders like Rahul Gandhi and Mamata Banerjee must realise that sovereignty and citizenship are the soul of India and not “imported vote banks.” “... (they) must realise that India’s sovereignty is not a play thing,” Jaitley, a Rajya Sabha member and senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader, wrote in a Facebook post.

Hitting out at the Congress, Jaitley said it was a mainstream party but had increasingly started taking “fringe positions” contrary to the stands taken by former prime ministers Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi.

“India’s sovereignty is paying a heavy price because of the quality of its political discourse. Though Mrs Indira Gandhi and Mr Rajiv Gandhi took a particular position in 1972 and 1985 for the deletion and deportation of foreigners, Rahul Gandhi takes a contrarian position and his party turns turtle,” Jaitley wrote.

The Congress and TMC have disrupted Rajya Sabha proceeding for the past three days over the draft NRC published in Guwahati on Monday that left out four million residents of Assam. The exercise is aimed at identifying for deportation “illegal immigrants”. “At the time of independence and partition of India, Assam was also a sore issue for Pakistan. They resented the fact that like Kashmir, Assam became a part of Independent India,” Jaitley claimed in his blog post.

Accusing Banerjee of changing her stance, Jaitley said that as a federal front leader, she was also taking a contrary view.

Congress spokesperson Priyanka Chaturvedi said, “Only if the former minister had cared to read what the Congress President’s view is, he would have saved his time and energy to write this entire fiction blog. The fact that cannot be denied is that the UPA was committed to the cause of deporting non-Indians, irrespective of their religion.”