Congress MP Rahul Gandhi, who is leading the pan-India foot march ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’, today said he can “lovingly meet” and hug his cousin Varun Gandhi, who is a BJP leader, but can never support the ideology he subscribes to. He said he’d rather be beheaded than go to the office of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh — the ideological parent of rival BJP.

“Varun Gandhi is in BJP. If he walks in here, then it might be a problem for him. My ideology doesn’t match his ideology. I can never go to the RSS office, you’ll have to behead me before that. My family has an ideology, a thought system. Varun once adopted, maybe still does, that ideology. He internalised that ideology. I can’t accept that,” he said.

Mr Gandhi revealed that Varun Gandhi had many years ago tried to say that RSS is doing good work. “I told him if you have read and seen what our family stood for, you wouldn’t accept it,” he added.

Varun Gandhi, who made headlines for his inflammatory comments against a particular community in speeches at public meetings in Pilibhit during the 2009 Lok Sabha election campaign, has for some time now been embarrassing his own party, the BJP, over various issues.

Varun Gandhi’s disillusionment with the BJP has been clearly visible after his mother Maneka Gandhi was not re-inducted into the Narendra Modi cabinet in 2019. Several articles written by him in major news organisations, and even a voluminous “rural manifesto”, have not taken a kind view of the Narendra Modi government, leading to murmurs of him trying to jump ship. 

Rahul Gandhi’s 10 years younger cousin, who was once the youngest general secretary of the BJP, has so far been given a long rope from his party in the hope that he will eventually get tired, political observers say. Some say Varun Gandhi may switch parties, though not necessarily to the Congress, before the next general elections.