New Delhi : Just a few days ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared unequivocally in the Lok Sabha that the religion of government was “India first” and the Constitution its “holy book”. But this has done little to cool the tempers on the issue of intolerance that is all set to be debated in the house on Monday. Speaker Sumitra Mahajan has accepted the notices of CPI(M) member P Karunakaran and Congress MP K C Venugopal for a discussion on the matter and listed the matter under Section 193 that does not entail voting.
Setting the tone for the government versus opposition confrontation on the issue, union parliamentary affairs minister M Venkaiah Naidu said that the government is ready to discuss intolerance if opposition shows tolerance and allows the House to function. “The entire campaign on intolerance is nothing but part of a campaign to slander the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Those who could not defeat Modi in polls have launched the disinformation campaign for political reasons,” he told reporters while describing the protests on the issue as “manufactured”.
From the other side Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi had also made it clear that his party was going to raise the issue of intolerance as what was happening in the country was “disturbing” and the Prime Minister is “silent”. Even in his response to the two-day debate in the Lok Sabha, Prime Minister Modi skirted any reference to these incidents although the government has condemned those incidents as they go against the traditional and highly cherished values of tolerance.
The government has been facing flak from different quarters on the issue of “growing intolerance” in the wake of the Dadri lynching, the beef row and incidents of communal violence. Even at the all-party meeting held on November 25 in the backdrop of actor Aamir Khan’s remarks on ‘growing intolerance’, opposition parties made a strong pitch for an early discussion on the issue, insisting that returning of awards by writers, artistes and filmmakers should not be taken lightly. But a section of the opposition, notably the Trinamool Congress, does not want this issue should be used for disrupting the House, and wants that a fair debate must be allowed.
A tale of two PCs
Meanwhile, two PCs — P Chidambaram and Priyanka Chopra — have added their own bits to the intolerance debate. At an event in the capital, the former union finance minister, who held the position of the union minister of state for internal security at that time, has said that the Rajiv Gandhi government’s decision to ban Salman Rushdie’s book ‘Satanic Verses’ in 1987 was wrong. This would surely provide ammo to the BJP during the debate on intolerance in the House.The other PeeCee, Priyanka Chopra, who has conquered American television with her ongoing serial “Quantico,” came out with a full throated defence of her Bollywood colleagues
Aamir Khan and Shahrukh Khan. She told reporters: “I don’t think intolerance is about me as an actor or you as a journalist but I think as a world look at what is happening all around. There have been countless wars everywhere and I am gonna name Paris, Syria, Lebanon, even Mumbai. Just for one second sit down and look around the world, don’t you think everything is intolerant? We are a globe! We as a people have become like that. Don’t use your anonymity on social media and blast anyone, just sit down at your home and think what you are doing! Look what we have made of this country. Our ancestors have fought years and years to achieve democracy, freedom of speech, language, opinion. We are dividing ourselves”.
