The Congress was the first political party to “encourage” the Ayodhya movement at a Hindu Sammelan organised by the VHP in Uttar Pradesh’s Muzaffarnagar town in 1983, says author and political scientist Vinay Sitapati in a new book.
It is no coincidence that two former Congress ministers Dau Dayal Khanna, who fashioned himself into a “twentieth century avatar of Tulsidas”, and Gulzarilal Nanda were in attendance at the meeting, Sitapati says in “Jugalbandi: The BJP Before Modi”.
While Khanna was a former Congress state minister, Nanda, a prominent Congress leader, was a minister in the cabinets of the first three prime ministers — Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri and Indira Gandhi. He became acting prime minister twice, in 1964 after the death of Nehru and in 1966 after Shastri’s demise.
“The Congress was the first political party to encourage the Ayodhya movement. Even Advani (Lal Krishna) admits to Congress’s initial backing for the…