Sanatan Sanstha has recently been in the news for all the wrong reasons. The media is running a kangaroo court against Sanatan Sanstha and also using it to malign right-wingers and all the Hindu community. This is the same media who even after thousands of terrorist attacks across the globe is yet to discover the religion of the terrorists. However, the one thing that the media conveniently ignored is the fact that this controversial outfit was propped up and protected by the Congress itself. This supposed Hindu organization is in news after its members were arrested with arms and ammunitions. Sanatan Sanstha is under the scanner of security agencies from over a very long period of time.
Time and again demands have been raised to put a ban on this controversial organization. Former Chief Minister of Maharashtra and senior Congress leader, Prithviraj Chavan said, “When I was the CM in April 2011, Maharashtra Police brought before me a lot of documentary evidence and a big dossier on this organisation. After studying it, we came to the conclusion that we should ban this organisation and sent a formal proposal to the Union Home Ministry”. He further added, “After a lot of correspondence, we sent a 1,000-page dossier in 2013 and it was being investigated by the Union Home Ministry”. Chavan further said that the Home Ministry also prepared a file but the decision to ban the Sanatan Sanstha was never taken because of some political reasons. He had gone to the extent of calling Sanatan Sanstha as ‘terrorist elements that pose a threat to the country’.
However, in 2015, former Home Minister Sushil Shinde had claimed that file dealing with proposal to ban Sanatan Sanstha never reached to his desk. He said, “The file never came to me. And if Chavan was so serious, he would have written to me or made a call. We are both Maharashtrians and belong to the same party … why did he not get in touch with me directly.” According to a Times of India report, “Officials who dealt with the matter confirmed that the ban requested by Maharashtra, Goa and Karnataka was turned down in 2013 as “no incriminating material was on hand to justify a ban under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act”.
In 2015, a report of ‘The Hindu’ quoted Minister of State for Home Affairs Kiren Rijiju saying, “The Congress government in Maharashtra had written to the Home Ministry requesting that Sanatan Sanstha be notified as a terrorist organisation. The MHA then scrutinised the note and the then Home Minister P.Chidambaram objected to it.”
Senior Congress leader and former Home Minister P. Chidambaram had in 2011 said no to the demand of Maharashtra, Goa and Karnataka to declare Sanatan Sanstha a “terrorist organisation.”
It’s fishy that Congress party repeatedly refused to ban Sanatan Sanstha and it also does not entertained the demand of aforementioned states to declare Sanatan Sanstha as a terrorist organization.
This whole outrage against controversial Sanatan Sanstha is aimed at reviving the narrative of ‘Saffron Terror’ but if one follows this organization’s history, it becomes very clear that it was the Congress party which saved it each and every time. This gives rise to doubt as to the origins of this controversial organisation, it seems as if the Sanatan Sanstha is the B-team of the Congress.