Shashi Tharoor trashes Sangh Parivar’s “revolting hypocrisy” on Gandhi

Congress MP Shashi Tharoor on October 3 pointed to an old tweet by the Bharatiya Janata Party’s national in-charge of Information & Technology Amit Malviya, and said, “These are the people who are now trying to appropriate Mahatma Gandhi's lustre. Don't know what's worse, the Singh Parivar's hatred for Gandhiji or its equally revolting hypocrisy about him today.”

In the tweet dating to January, 2015, Malviya had shared a link to an article entitled 'Why I killed Gandhi’ and said “Nathuram Godse had his reasons to assassinate MK Gandhi. A fair society must hear him out too.”

In 2013, when BJP was in Opposition, Malviya had tweeted “The truth about Mahatma Gandhi: he was a wily bigot, not India's smiling saint. This will cause a lot of heartburn”, while sharing an article by the author Patrick French, which was in fact entitled “The truth about Mahatma Gandhi: he was a wily operator, not India’s smiling saint”.

Yesterday, however, on Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary, Malviya praised the Father of the Nation in a tweet, saying, “his clarion call of peace and ahimsa have the power to unite humanity”.

Tharoor was not alone in condemning this double speak. Many other users and commentators on Twitter also used it to hit out at the hypocrisy of many in the Sangh Parivar who make a public show of paying obeisance to Mahatma Gandhi, while revering his assassin.