Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad faced protests in the House on Monday from the treasury benches for his remarks allegedly drawing a parallel between the Islamic State and the RSS, the ideological mentor of the ruling BJP.
Mr. Azad denied having made the comparison and submitted a recording of his speech. “This is the CD of my speech. If anything wrong is found in it, you can move a privilege motion,” he said of his speech at a programme organised by the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Hind on Monday.
“Everyone who is not [an] RSS or BJP [member] is a terrorist to them,” he said.
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In that speech, Mr. Azad had said both the RSS and the IS attempted to divide communities. “The fight is not about Hindu and Muslim. It is a fight of perspectives. We are against the narrow fundamentalist mindset, whether it is of a Hindu, Sikh or Muslim. We oppose and reject the forces that are destroying the Muslim nations. We protest against the IS type of forces in the same measure as we oppose outfits like the RSS,” he had said.
Union Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi raised the issue and said the Congress must apologise for Mr. Azad’s statement. The comparison of the RSS with the IS was the “great old party’s grand new secular formula,” he said.
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Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said: “Nothing is a bigger threat to the world currently than the IS. It is using tanks and armies against other religions. It offers instructions on how to rape women. To suggest it is like another organisation gives it respectability, this is what you have done, perhaps inadvertently.”