Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel equated the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh with the Naxals, and said that “the way the left-wing extremists active in his state are dictated by their senior cadres” from neighbouring states, the same way RSS workers are controlled from Nagpur, the Sangh headquarters.
“There will be an impartial investigation (into last week’s Kawardha violence)… In Chhattisgarh, no work of RSS people got done during 15 years (of the BJP rule from 2003 to 2018) and they continued to work as bonded labourers. Even now, they (RSS workers in the state) are not heard as everything is being controlled from Nagpur. Like the Naxal leaders are in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and other states and their cadres (in Chhattisgarh) do the job of firing bullets and getting hit. The same is the situation in the RSS. The local RSS workers have no value…Everything is centred in Nagpur,” Baghel said.
The Bharatiya Janata Party, the political party branched out of the RSS, hit back at Baghel, calling his statement “language of extremists”.
The CM made the statements in response to a query on Governor Anusuiya Uikey’s letter to the state government seeking an impartial enquiry into the violence that took place on October 5 in Kawardha, the headquarter of Kabirdham district, during a right-wing rally.
“They are left with no issues to raise. They have nothing to say over farmers, tribals, Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribes and businesses and hence they have resorted to only two issues – conversion and communalism, in which they have mastery. They make people fight. The business establishments which were shut due to the coronavirus crisis for a long time are now gradually opening up and they are trying to ruin it by instigating riots. It will not be allowed. We have to keep an eye on their attempts to give communal colour to fights over petty issues,” the CM said.
The ruling Congress party has accused the BJP of carrying out the violence in Kawardha.
BJP MP Santosh Pandey and former parliamentarian Abhishek Singh were among those named in an FIR lodged in connection with the case.
Baghel also slammed the central government over the former’s claim that there was no coal shortage in India, accusing the Centre of failing to handle the crisis.
“The government of India had said there is no crisis of coal and power generation in the country, but dozens of power plants are shut in the country. If there is no lack of coal in the country, why has the coal minister reached Chhattisgarh?” he said.
