Anant Kumar Hegde’s latest: Intellectuals don’t understand meaning of antar atma

Union minister of state for skill development and entrepreneurship Anant Kumar Hegde said for intellectuals, life was all about fulfilling the needs of the human body.

In another attack on “intellectuals”, Union Skill Development Minister Anant Kumar Hegde on Thursday said at an event that such people don’t understand the meaning of ‘antar atma’ and for them, there was no difference between a living human and a dead body. The ‘motormouth’ BJP leader, who has made a string of controversial remarks in the past seven months despite a restraining order by PM Narendra Modi, further said that for intellectuals life was all about fulfilling the needs of the human body.

“So called intellectuals don’t understand ‘antar atma’, for them there is no difference between a living human and a dead body as both have same body parts. These people think fulfilling the needs of the human body is only what life is all about,” Hegde said at an event.

At a Skill India event in Belagavi region of Karnataka in January, Hegde had derided intellectuals, poets and writers as people in the pursuit of government largesse. “They call themselves intellectuals because they want government sites (a reference to allocated properties). We are supposed to assume what they write is literature and poetry,” the minister had said.

In another event earlier in the year, the BJP leader had equated his critics to “barking dogs” and even claimed that an Indian flew the first aircraft long before the Wright brothers did in the early 1900s. However, his remark in December last year that the BJP would “change the Constitution” and “secularists lack an identity of their own” came in for criticism from all quarters.