In Tuesday's Lok Sabha debate on Operation Sindoor, BJP member Nishikant Dubey launched a blistering attack on Congress leaders Priyanka Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi. He accused the two siblings of acting as if they own exclusive rights over the legacy of India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.
Dubey began his address by thanking the Indian military for their bold retaliation after the Pahalgam terrorist attack. "I would like to thank Indian armed forces for providing an appropriate response to Pakistan following the Pahalgam terror attack. I pay my respects to those innocent individuals who were martyred in the name of religion," he stated.
Disagreeing with Priyanka Gandhi's call to forget the past, Dubey dwelled on the need to remember history. "The individual, the society or the community that forgets its past, only gets destroyed. We should learn from the past and live in the present. The two things, which are being discussed in Parliament, are Kashmir and China," he pointed out.
He blamed the Gandhi brothers for taking Nehru's legacy as their own right. "Nehru may be your grandfather, but he was the first Prime Minister of India and I have the right to question his actions. You don't have a guarantee or USP for him. I have the right to question the punishment I am being given," he said.
Dubey referred to Nehru's own work, especially his book Glimpses of World History, and noted that Mahmud Ghazni had been categorized as a "warrior" — something Dubey asserted still defines the current mentality of Congress.
On India's Partition, he held top leadership figures such as Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Liaquat Ali responsible but opined that the dynastic nature of the Congress party only added to the harm. He accused Nehru of making his sister, Vijay Laxmi Pandit, India's ambassador in Moscow as a step that angered Liaquat Ali and could possibly have driven him to migrate to Pakistan.
"The same dynasty politics has led the Congress party and the nation to this point," Dubey said.
He also touched upon the historical events of Kashmir's integration into India. He explained that during the time when the Quit India Movement was underway in 1942, Sheikh Abdullah was instigating the departure of the monarchy in Kashmir. Dubey went on to explain that Jinnah aligned himself with the monarch while the Maharaja suspected Nehru of not being supportive of him—leading to a holdup of joining India.
Praising doubts regarding the implementation of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir, Dubey stated, "The King signed the same Instrument of Accession as the other 600 princely states. When the same was put in place in Manipur, Kutch, and Uttar Pradesh, then why was Article 370 put in place in Kashmir?"
He said that if the decisions of the Nehru-Gandhi family are responsible for the disarray in Kashmir, they must also take the blame. "If the Nehru-Gandhi family is to be blamed for the current state of affairs in Kashmir, then we will blame them. Why are Priyanka Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi objecting to this?" he said.
In his contentious remark, Dubey quoted a purported CIA report stating that the Soviet Union economically supported nearly 40 per cent of Congress Members of Parliament and worked as Russian agents.
Dubey also picked fault with Nehru's foreign policy, more specifically holding him responsible for the Chinese occupation of Tibet, which, in Dubey's view, has fueled Beijing's aggressive stance along India's borders.
Dubey finished with a nod to Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw, claiming that the 1971 war hero had his pension withheld for decades. "When Abdul Kalam became President and intervened, he eventually received the pension for Gen Mankeshaw in 2008," he said.
"You don't respect the Army Chief, the 1971 war hero, and then say you respect the armed forces," Dubey finished.
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