Union minister Kapil Sibal said BJP veteran LK Advani and the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) should tell the country on what they thought about BJP leader Arun Jaitley’s reported comment that the BJP was using Hindutva as an “opportunistic” tool.
Describing the comments as a “very, very serious issue,” he said “Congress has been saying that BJP is misleading the people. Now, it should apologise to them.”
Though Jaitley had issued a statement on Saturday saying he had not used the word ‘opportunistic,’ Sibal was unrelenting in his attack saying the leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha should apologise to the people and explain why he had said so.
Sibal referred to the communal violence following Advani’s rath yatra and the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and said these are all “politics of opportunism which claimed hundreds of lives… This means they speak something and do something else.”
“For years, we have been saying about their politics of opportunism. Now, people should also know the real face of BJP,” he said.
The reported WikiLeaks cables had reported that Robert Blake, Charge at the US Embassy, had conveyed to Washington after a meeting with Jaitley on May 6, 2005, that “Jaitley argued that Hindu nationalism will always be a talking point for BJP.”
The cable also said Arun Jaitley told the diplomat that Hindu nationalism was an “opportunistic issue” for the party.
Jaitley had on Saturday issued a statement saying “the use of the word opportunistic in reference to nationalism or Hindu nationalism is neither my view nor my language. It could be the diplomat’s own usage,” Party president Nitin Gadkari and the RSS had backed him saying the word “opportunistic” could be the diplomat’s usage.
