Constitution, Deen Dayal can't go together: Tharoor

Jaipur: Taking a dig at Prime Mi-nister Narendra Modi, politician-writer Shashi Tharoor has said that while the PM describes the country’s Constitution as “holy”, he also hails Hindutva icon Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyay as a “hero”, and asserted that the two stands cannot go hand in hand.

Speaking at the ongoing Jaipur Literature Festi-val, the 61-year-old MP said there was a dire need for Hindus to stand up and recognise what was being done “in their name” and speak out against it.

“We need to call a spade a spade. We are living in a country where on the one hand the prime minister says the Constitution is his holy book and on the other hand he extols as a hero and instructs his ministries to study the works, writings and teachings of Deen Dayal Upadhyay, who explicitly rejects the Constitution and who shares that the Constitution is fundamentally flawed,” the former Union minister said.

The two thoughts, he said, were contradictory.

“You can’t have these two thoughts in the same sentence… To have it both and to be allowed by our public discourse to get away with it for so long seems to me somewhat troubling,” he said to thunderous applause from the audience at the packed front lawn, the largest venue at the iconic Diggi Palace where the festival is being held.

Mr Tharoor said Upadhyay believed the Constitution “rests on the flawed premise that the nation is a territory of India and all the people on it”.

“Whereas he (Upadhyay) says that is not correct, the nation is not a territory, it is a people and it is therefore the Hindu people. Which means you need a Hindu nation, a Hindu rashtra and that is what the Constitution sho-uld reflect, which of cou-rse it does not,” he said.

That, Mr Tharoor added, was the essential contradiction.

“(You) cannot hail Upa-dhyay and the Constit-ution... At the same time,” he said.