It’s a convenient season for being ‘proud Hindu’: Arun Jaitley

NEW DELHI: Mocking AAP for emphasising that its candidate for East Delhi Atishi Marlena is a Hindu of Rajput caste, finance minister Arun Jaitley said this showed that all political parties are now forced to display their Hindu background and defer to sentiments of the majority community.

For Atishi to shed the family legacy of her “Leftleaning parents who were important interlocutors in seeking pardon for Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru to start wearing her religion as well as caste of her father and spouse was “hypocrisy”, he added.

While the instinct of the Kejriwal-led party is “obviously to support jehadis and separatists”, they realise that they need to appear as Hindus in order to win elections. “The contrarians are merely a fringe. One cannot belong to the fringe and win elections. Religiosity is suddenly being discovered. Majority bashing has been replaced by a self-proclaimed title of a ‘proud Hindu’ or even a ‘Punjabi Hindu Kshatriya’. Elections, after all, are a convenient season for all the neo-converts,” wrote Jaitley in his blog.


He said other opposition parties are also constrained to showcase their Hindu identity. He said Congress leader and party’s candidate for Bhopal seat, Digvijay Singh, has also been “compelled” to publicly declare that he is a proud Hindu too.

Jaitley also referred to two descrptions — “Shiv Bhakt” and “Janeu Dhari Brahmin” — Congress has used for party chief Rahul Gandhi and said it marked a departure from the days of first Prime Minister, Jawahar Lal Nehru, who believed Hinduism was obscurantist and a hurdle for the development of scientific temperament. It is also a success for BJP which under L K Advani argued that secularism cannot be reduced to majority-bashing. Jaitley recalled that no party except BJP supported Vishwa Hindu Parishad when came out with “proud to be a Hindu” pitch, but it is the VHP which has had the last laugh.