Reacting sharply at the recent remarks made by Union minister Anantkumar Hegde, Congress president Rahul Gandhi Monday said that Hegde is an embarrassment to every Indian and deserves to be sacked. Gandhi's reaction came after Hegde got engaged in a spat with Karnataka Congress president Dinesh Gundu Rao on Twitter, only to drag the latter's personal life into the public discourse. Taking to Twitter, Gandhi said: "This man is an embarrassment to every Indian. He's unfit to be a Union Minister and deserves to be sacked." This man is an embarrassment to every Indian. He's unfit to be a Union Minister and deserves to be sacked. — Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) January 28, 2019 Earlier today, Gundu took to Twitter to question Hegde's achievements as a minister, to which Hegde replied: "I shall definitely answer this guy @dineshgrao's queries, before which could he please reveal himself as to who he is along with his achievements? I only know him as a guy who ran behind a Muslim lady." It was a reference to Gundu's Muslim wife. The Congress leader answered back, calling it Hegde’s "lack of culture" and asked him "to try and become a more dignified human". I shall definitely answer this guy @dineshgrao's queries, before which could he please reveal himself as to who he is along with his achievements? I only know him as a guy who ran behind a Muslim lady. — Anantkumar Hegde (@AnantkumarH) January 27, 2019 Known for making inflammatory speeches, Hegde had yesterday fuelled a controversy while addressing a meeting of Hindu Jagaran Vedike – a youth organisation of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad — where he said, “If a hand has touched a Hindu girl, then that hand must not exist.” Hegde had further said that Hindu youths should not become sacrificial lambs, but be dominant like tigers and elephants. Hegde is not new to such controversies. In 2018, at an event of the skill development ministry, Hegde repeated a claim that an Indian flew the first aircraft long before the Wright brothers did in the early 1900s. Hegde said an aircraft created by Shivakar Talpade flew in Mumbai in 1895. In December 2017, Hegde triggered a furore by saying that those who call themselves secular and intellectual were lacking an identity of their own. “Those who, without knowing their parental blood, call themselves secular, they don’t have an identity. They don’t know their parentage, but they are intellectuals,” the five-time BJP MP said. He also said that the BJP would remove the word secular from the Constitution but later apologised for his remark in Parliament.
