Intellectual, ideological response to Left a must: Shah at RSS meet

NEW DELHI: Union home minister Amit Shah said it is important to have a clear, ideological and culturally rooted intellectual plan to tackle the Left.

Speaking at a meeting organised to pay tributes to P Parameshwaran, among the senior-most pracharaks of the RSS, who passed away recently, Shah said people like him have fought the supremacy of the Left all their lives, and their work on cultural nationalism and Antyodaya, uplifting of the weakest section of the society, was an inspiration to the party and Sangh workers.

Staying away from making any political comment, Shah restricted himself to paying rich tributes to Parameshwaran. Parameshwarn's book on Narayana Guru was important to understand the efforts made by the saint community to initiate social reforms in the country, he said. "I have met Paramesharanji five times in my life. When we decided to celebrate Deen Dayal Upadhyay's birth anniversary, I was meeting many people to understand how should such an event be held. That is when I met Parameshwaran. I can never forget the two-hour meeting with him then. How do we all work, how does this work gain more mobility - I got a lot of clarity on how one should work from him."


The home minister said it was political thinker and RBI board member S Gurumurthy who had once asked him to meet Parameshwar for advice. Calling him a selfless worker for the society, “Every time I met him I felt whatever honour he had received from the government was not enough, and that no award that can do justice for him."