A hundred “volunteers” — young technocrats from the corporate world – here on Monday swore allegiance to the cause of hindutva.
Bharatiya Janata Party president Nitin Gadkari “received” the free services of the volunteers wearing orange T-shirts.
Sanjay Kaul, who set up the United Volunteers Association, said at the outset that his association was inspired by the principles dear to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and his organisation was interested in furthering the hindutva ideology.
After the BJP's 2009 Lok Sabha defeat, a large number of party supporters were despondent and wanted to do something to get the right message to the people on what the hindutva party was all about, Mr. Kaul said.
As the 100 men and women got on to the stage at Mavlankar Hall to take their oath of allegiance to the BJP, Mr. Gadkari and the former RSS spokesperson, M.G. Vaidya, looked on.
‘Not anti-Muslim'
Mr. Gadkari repeated what the senior party leaders had been saying for the past two decades: the BJP was not anti-Muslim or anti-minority; it believed in “justice for all, appeasement for none”; and it was the “pseudo-secularists posing as liberals,” who were painting the BJP as a right-wing fundamentalist group.
While the BJP was not for theocracy — it did believe in parliamentary democracy – its view was that while institutions could be secular, “individuals can never be secular” as they do profess some religion were cremated or buried according to some religious rites, he said.
Earlier, Mr. Kaul said his effort to strengthen the BJP was not only inspired by RSS principles, but also by Mr. Gadkari's view that the party needed to add some 10 per cent votes to its core constituency to be back in the race for the next Lok Sabha polls.
