The anti Citizenship Amendment Act protests took an Islamist turn which completely exposed the nefarious agenda of Sharjeel Imam, Shehla Rashid and the ilk. Despite the best efforts from liberals like Shashi Tharoor to prevent the protests from being reduced to an Islamist agenda, the protests fizzled out as people saw through their agendas. BJP MP Tejasvi Surya appearing on the Times Now Summit hit out at those chanting the slogans of ‘La ilaha illallah’ and stated that Hindutva cannot be dominating because it is a victim of aggression without caring for being politically correct.
Speaking at the Times Now Summit 2020, during a debate on the subject ‘Who’s misrepresenting Hindutva?’, Surya said that Hindutva is the ‘intellectual, politico-socio response of Hindus to protect themselves against aggression’. Responding to a question on the need for Hindutva, at a time when the country is not under the threat of any external aggression by other faiths, Surya said that if ‘Muslims of this country start defending the atrocities of Mughal era, then they will be held culpable’. “The difference between ‘Jai Shri Ram’ and ‘La ilaha illallah’ is that the former says victory to Lord Ram and the latter says there is no god other than Allah,” he added.
Surya showed exemplary clarity as he didn’t care about political correctness and hit out at those painting Hindutva as the aggressors. Surya further backed his argument by saying that ‘the fact that India has lost 1/3rd of its land to foreign faiths is a clear indication that this was religious-cultural aggression’.
During the campaign trail itself, Surya had emerged as someone who wore his love for Hindutva and Narendra Modi on his sleeve as he emerged as BJP’s poster boy of Hindutva. The BJP’s move to choose Tejasvi to make a debut speech in Parliament, in response to the motion of thanks to the President’s address signifies the trust that the party has in him. Importantly, Home Minister Amit Shah started his Karnataka campaign with a roadshow for Tejasvi which points to a sign of greater things in store for Surya.
Unlike Surya, Tharoor who tried to play the secular card during the peak of anti-CAA protests had to regret it. Tharoor attempted to position himself and his party as the true believers of India’s constitutional values as he took to Twitter to call out Muslim fundamentalists for using their supremacist religious slogan La Ilaha Ilallah in a protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act. While this was a pleasant surprise for many, soon, an army of outraged individuals descended upon him bashing him for daring to speak against the slogan and their means of protest.
While Tharoor and many others almost daily spin baseless accusations of Hindu extremism on the rise, all it took was one tweet against an Islamic slogan for Tharoor to be lambasted left, right and centre. Shashi Tharoor, as a result of the unprecedented attack on his freedom of expression, put out subsequent tweets in which he attempted to calm tempers and tone down his initial rhetoric.
Tejasvi Surya is very social media savvy and he is accustomed to brutal Twitter battles on matters of ideology, so wording his thoughts on ideology in the most articulate manner is rather a hobby for the young MP, who may lack the usual political correctness but delves blows that his ideological contenders cannot recover from in debates such as these.
The young MP is destined for big things with such ideological clarity. He has an inspiring effect on the youth that seek winning answers in this day and age of heated political and ideological debates.