Heart-warming ‘confession’ by Vp naidu

The occasion was Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu delivering the first Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel Memorial Lecture at the Constitution Club on the 142nd birth anniversary of the “Iron Man” on Tuesday, 31 October. The event was organised by the Citizen’s Council, Delhi, which was established by a popular Jana Sangh (erstwhile avatar of the BJP) Lok Sabha MP, Kanwarlal Gupta in 1962. Paying rich tribute to Patel, Naidu expressed his thoughts in English and Hindi and said that “we must all be grateful to his vision, determination and pragmatism in preventing India’s Balkanisation and achieving the herculean task of politically integrating more than 560 princely states with the Union of India.” After apologising for not speaking in “good Hindi”, Naidu made a “confession” in Hindi. He said that when anti-Hindi agitation was taking place in Tamil Nadu, he was a college student in Andhra Pradesh. “As Madras was nearby, we also got influenced.” Naidu said he asked someone, “Where is Hindi?” On being told that it was at a railway station nearby and another at a different location, Nadiu said, “We marched to the spots and put black paint on the Hindi signs.” “It was only when in 1993 I came to Delhi that I realised that the country can’t move forward as one entity without Hindi.” The Council’s convenor, Professor P.K. Chandla and Mewa Ram Arya, both former BJP MLAs, said that their organisation had been celebrating Patel’s birth anniversary since 1962.