As Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the new Parliament building on Sunday and the hashtag “My Parliament My India” was trending on Twitter, a tweet from the Rashtriya Janata Dal caused a firestorm by comparing the building to a coffin.
Posting photos of a coffin and the new building, the RJD tweeted: “What is this?” This led to a flurry of angry comments online and an angry response from the BJP. “A case of treason should be registered against these people who have compared the new Parliament building to a coffin,” BJP leader Sushil Modi was quoted as saying by ANI. His party colleague Dushyant Gautam told ANI, “This is very unfortunate. Today they are comparing it to a coffin, were they comparing the old Parliament to ‘zero’? Earlier we were sitting on zero.”
what is this? pic.twitter.com/9NF9iSqh4L
— Rashtriya Janata Dal (@RJDforIndia) May 28, 2023
BJP MP Sudhanshu Trivedi told the news agency, “Political comments should not be made on the day the new Parliament building is inaugurated today. All political parties should rise above of politics and respect it”.
Other parties and opposition leaders also criticized the inauguration of the new Parliament building. The Congress noted that the new Parliament building was inaugurated on the birth anniversary of Hindutva ideologue VD Savarkar. Congress general secretary in charge of communications, Jairam Ramesh, tweeted: “On this day, May 28: Nehru, the person who did the most to nurture parliamentary democracy in India, was cremated in 1964. Savarkar, the person whose ideological ecosystem led to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, was born in 1883.”
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi hit out at PM Modi saying, “Parliament is the voice of the people! The Prime Minister is treating the inauguration of Parliament as a rajyabhishek (coronation).”
Ramesh said Speaker Droupadi Murmu, the first Adivasi to become Speaker, failed to fulfill her constitutional duties and inaugurate the new Parliament building. “A self-aggrandizing authoritarian Prime Minister with a total disregard for parliamentary procedures, who rarely attends or engages with Parliament, opens the New Parliament Building in 2023,” he said, adding that the fabrication of facts by of “distortionists” and the drum-beating of the media reaches new lows in 2023.
The Congress, along with 19 other parties, boycotted the inauguration ceremony.
Speaking about the event, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar said, “I’m glad I didn’t go. I’m worried after seeing what happened there. Are we taking the country backwards? Was this event only for limited people?”
Samajwadi Party (SP) leader Swami Prasad Maurya criticized the ceremony held to install the ‘Sengol’ scepter in the Parliament building. Amid chanting of Vedic hymns by the priests of Karnataka’s Shringeri Math, the Prime Minister performed ‘Ganapati Homam’ to invoke the gods to bless the inauguration of the new building.
“It is extremely unfortunate that only fundamentalist Brahmin gurus from the south were called to the Sengol scepter worship facility. If the BJP government had faith in India as a secular sovereign nation, then all the religious leaders of the country, such as Buddhist Dharmacharyas (monks), Jain Acharyas (sages), Guru Granthis, Muslim religious leaders (Maulanas), Christian religious leaders (shepherds), should have been invited. By not doing so, the BJP has shown the their corrupt mentality and hate-filled thinking. While the BJP government is walking the path of a monarchy by establishing the Sengol sceptre, it is also trying to establish Brahminism by calling the Brahmin religious leaders from the south.”
