Bihar BJP president Sanjay Jaiswal dispatches Bhagavad Gita to Rahul Gandhi amid Hindutva row

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Bihar BJP president Sanjay Jaiswal on Sunday dispatched a copy of the Bhagavad Gita to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, whom he charged with having a lack of understanding of Hindutva through utterances made in support of controversial remarks in a recent book authored by former Union minister Salman Khurshid.

Addressing a press conference here, Jaiswal called Gandhi “the most confused leader in the country” who was unable to appreciate the basics of Hinduism despite "so many publicised tours of temples”.

Jaiswal, who was formerly the BJP’s chief whip in the Lok Sabha, said Gandhi’s attempts to distinguish Hinduism from Hindutva was “height of ignorance” and a reflection on the belief of the Congress in the dictum of “divide and rule”.

“Gandhi has claimed that he has read the Upanishads. We wish to know if he read an Italian translation," Jaiswal said in an indirect tongue-in-cheek reference to AICC president Sonia Gandhi.

A former Congress president himself, Gandhi had defended party colleague Khurshid, who is in the eye of a storm over a book in which the latter has sought to draw parallels between Hindutva, a term associated with the ideology of the BJP-RSS combine, and the radical Islam propagated by terrorist outfits like ISIS and Boko Haram.

The comparison has met with disapproval from within the Congress. Senior leaders like Ghulam Nabi Azad had said that drawing such a parallel was uncalled for.

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