New Delhi, Oct 21 :
Chandra Kumar Bose, vice-president of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) West Bengal unit, on Sunday led a scathing attack on the Congressparty, saying they have distorted the history of India’s freedom struggle and converted the country into a dynastic dictatorship.
Speaking to ANI, Bose said, “Right from 1857 onwards, with the sepoy uprising, Mangal Pandey’s Andolan (movement), then Shaheed Bhagat Singh’s sacrifice, Rajguru, Binoy Badal Dinesh, and many others, this entire history of India’s freedom struggle has been completely distorted and obliterated by the Congress regime. The Congress party has converted India into a dynastic dictatorship.”
Bose berated former Congress leader and India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
“Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose was the first prime minister of undivided India. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was the first Prime Minister of the divided dominion of India, not of united India. So this history must be told to the youth of our nation,” Bose said.
“It is also a fact that when the Azad Hind Fauj wanted to come to Delhi and hoist the national tricolour at the Red Fort in 1944, it was Pandit Nehru and the Congress leaders, who opposed the Azad Hind government and Azad Hind Fauj with the connivance of the British,” he added.
Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, who on this day in 1943 had established the provincial Azad Hind government in Singapore, is often a topic for a political slugfest between the Congress and the BJP.
Earlier on Sunday, after unfurling the national flag at the Red Fort to mark the 75th anniversary of the ‘Azad Hind government’, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said “that several good sons of the Nation like him (Bose) as well as Ambedkar (B. R. Ambedkar) and Patel (Vallabhbhai Patel) were forgotten in the favour of one family.”
The Prime Minister said Bose promised an India where everyone would be undivided by religions and have equal rights, but those dreams, even after years of independence, remain unfulfilled.
However, the Congress refuted the Prime Minister’s claims, with senior party leader Ashwani Kumar saying that his party has “never neglected” the Netaji’s sacrifices.
“Congress has always considered Netaji Subhash Bose in high esteem. Not only that, the Congress being the party of freedom movement has given a special place and an honour at all times and at all places to Netaji. In my view, the Prime Minister’s statement, given the fact that the elections are just around the corner, is factually wrong and is totally incorrect. I don’t agree with him,” Kumar said.
