Suspended Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar on Monday started yet another controversy by saying that Hindu Mahasabha leader VD Savarkar was the first proponent of two-nation theory and added that he invented the term “Hindutva” to create a religious divide in the society.
His remark came at a time when Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s portrait at the Aligarh Muslim University has sparked off a row. The Congress party, however, distanced from his remark, saying that Aiyar should retire from politics and sit at home.
The Congress had suspended Aiyar from its primary membership and slapped a show-cause notice on him for his “neech” remark against Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which had stemmed into a massive controversy just ahead of the Gujarat polls.
“Situation in India is an abhorrent one. In 1923, a man called V D Savarkar in his book invented a word which doesn’t exist in any religious text, ‘Hindutva’. “So, first proponent of the two-nation theory was an ideological guru of those who are currently in power in India,” Aiyar said at an event in Lahore.
Aiyar further said that he referred to Jinnah as the “Quaid-e-Azam” and the hysterical Indian TV anchors were demanding to know how an Indian could go to Pakistan and say this.
“I know many Pakistanis who called M.K. Gandhi as Mahatma Gandhi; does that make them unpatriotic Pakistanis?” he added.
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