Minutes before former President Pranab Mukherjee was scheduled to deliver a speech at an RSS event on 7 June, the Congress party tweeted out a video titled ‘RSS for Dummies’, on its official Twitter handle.
The video was shared with the message: “Today is a very fitting day to bring you all a primer on what the RSS really stands for,” reflecting the party’s clear disapproval of Mukherjee’s participation.
The video begins with a factoid on RSS founder KB Hegdewar, whose house Mukherjee had visited earlier in the evening.
Mukherjee’s entry at the visitor's register read: “Today I came here to pay my respect and homage to a great son of Mother India”.
Meanwhile, the Congress’ video talks about Hegdewar not permitting the Sangh from participating in the Satyagraha movement.
The video then alleges that the RSS leaders encouraged their members to join the British Civic Guard. The third point states that the Sangh was against the national flag, while the fourth slide talks of how an RSS leader had presented Godse with a revolver to shoot Mahatma Gandhi.
The video also mentions that the RSS had opposed liberalisation, and was in a manner inspired by Hitler’s Nazi Germany. In the end, the video claims that the RSS had opposed freedom, while the Congress had fought for it.
Several Congress leaders, including P Chidambaram and Mukherjee’s daughter had earlier expressed their disapproval over Mukherjee’s attendance at the event.
While Chidambaram had said he should go to the event and "tell them what is wrong with their ideology,” his daughter and Congress leader Sharmistha Mukherjee said that Pranab had given the BJP and the Sangh an opening to plant false stories, as his "speech will be forgotten" but "visuals will remain.”
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