Says Congress will struggle to safeguard hard-won Constitutional freedoms
New Delhi : Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi on Thursday condemned the way the Modi government is trying to gag the voice of dissent, the latest example being ban slapped on a Dalit student group of IIT-Madras last week.
He added his voice to those opposing the ban clamped just because the government is not ready to tolerate any sort of criticism against it. The office of Rahul tweeted that “a wide cross-section of civil society leaders met Rahul Gandhi on the issue of BJP Government’s continuing attack on freedom of speech & dissent.” It added that “Rahul Gandhi expressed full solidarity with the people’s struggle to safeguard hard-won Constitutional freedoms.”
The IIM-Madras was directed by the HRD Ministry headed by Smriti Irani to impose ban on the Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle for initiating debates on socio-economic-political issues.
The institute had earlier also banned a discussion forum for spreading ‘hatred against Modi since it had questioned the government’s policies on the use of Hindi, cow-slaughter, ghar-wapsi programme and promotion Vedas.
Meanwhile, senior Congress MP Mani Shankar Aiyar attacked the Modi government for gagging the voice of the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) who have evolved under the umbrella of the Constitution’s fundamental rights in a write-up, titled “Be warned: Today an NGO, tomorrow you.”
He said Modi has mounted attack on the NGOs after finding that “he can’t do in Delhi, as freely as he did in Gandhi Nagar” all that he wants to do and get away with it because he cannot triffle with the strong Constitution and because of his lack of a majority in the Rajya Sabha, an alert media and well-established institutions of governance.
Aiyar specially referred to the way the government is hounding out Greenpeace India and its affiliate Greenpeace Environment Trust by freezing their bank accounts to cripple their activities, charging them with misuse of foreign funds and acting with the foreigners for ‘anti-national’ activities.
“Ministry of Home Affairs apparently regards testifying about India before a meeting abroad as ‘anti-national’, but it seems MHA regard it as perfectly patriotic for the Prime Minister to go abroad and claim on foreign soil (once in the present of a foreign PM) that all Indians were ashamed of being Indian until he became PM.”
Aiyar referred to Delhi High Court’s stinging retort to MHA in January while de-freezing Greenpeace India”s bank accounts and pointed out that its persecution continues, with the RBI in March blocking all transfer of foreign funds to it and not allowing it access to any funds, domestic or foreign, for the last three months.
Pointing out that Greenpeace receives 70 per cent of its funding from the Indian sources to fight for the Indian causes, the Congress leader said the NGO cannot use even these funds raised domestically. He pointed out that the NGO”s domestic donations cannot be frozen as they have nothing to do with the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) invoked by the government to harass it.
