Nirmala Sitharaman and Anurag Thakur attack Rahul Gandhi over caste, he says fight will go on

The remark led to an uproar and SP’s Akhilesh Yadav questioned how anyone could ask about a person’s caste in the House.

Jagdambika Pal, who was chairing the proceedings, said nobody should ask about anyone’s caste in the House and he would expunge the remark. But until midnight Tuesday, there was no official communication on the removal of the remark from the House records.

Posting a YouTube link to the speech of Thakur on X, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, “This speech by my young and energetic colleague, Shri @ianuragthakur is a must hear. A perfect mix of facts and humour, exposing the dirty politics of the INDI Alliance.”

In the House, Gandhi told the Chair, “Anurag Thakurji insulted me but I don’t want any apology from him. I am waging a battle… Insult me as much as you wish but don’t forget we will ensure the passage of the caste census here (in this House).”

Sitharaman said she was pained to hear the casual conversation on the Budget halwa ceremony by the Leader of the Opposition. She cited Jawaharlal Nehru’s statement against reservation in services, the shelving of the First Backward Class Commission under Kaka Kalelkar, the placing of the Mandal Commission report on the backburner by Indira Gandhi, and Rajiv Gandhi’s interview to a journalist against reservation.

“How many SCs, STs and OBCs are there in the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation? There is not a single SC. Charity begins at home. Among the five trustees in the Rajiv Gandhi Charitable Trust, there is no SC,” she said.

“We all can try to do something good for SCs and ST, but when generation after generation the statements are similar, and there is no tangible work, how will anyone trust your big statements?” she said.

“And on an emotional issue like halwa, where officials are sitting inside a room for days, you ask how many SCs are there? And when I put my hand on my head and laugh, you unleash the troll army saying I laughed when SCs were mentioned. I was holding my head at the casual approach to the matter,” she said.

Sitharaman said it was an old tradition of Budget-making that since officials could not come out of the room for days on end until the Budget was presented in Parliament, they made halwa as on any important occasion.

“They stay in the cellar of the North Block for five nights and four days because the confidentiality of the Budget has to be respected… It became a photo event in 2013-14. The Leader of Opposition was a full-fledged leader by that time and had also shown independence by tearing an Ordinance. Did he ask the then Finance Minister, who did the photo event going into the cellar, how many SCs were there among the officials? He was powerful; he had a remote control. Why did he not cancel the halwa? This question is being asked as part of a conspiracy to divide people of the country. It’s a shame,” she said.

According to her, two among those involved in the preparation of the Budget got to know about the deaths of family members once they were in the cellar – but did not come out until the Budget speech because of their commitment to the Budget-making exercise.

Earlier, Thakur took swipes at Gandhi over his claim that the Budget was an extension of the BJP’s propensity to entrap people in a chakravyuh of the kind in which Abhimanyu was killed. He said “some people were accidental Hindu and their knowledge of the Mahabharat was also accidental”.

He said some people need to read a book The Great Indian Novel by Congress leader Shashi Tharoor in order to understand the Mahabharat – adding that this may lead to a show-cause notice being issued to the author. “At the very start of the Lok Sabha, I had asked whether the people of the Opposition, who were waving the copy of the Constitution in the name of saving the Constitution, knew the number of pages in it, but they had no answer. These people have neither read the Constitution nor the Mahabharat, but it is surprising that they have not even watched the Mahabharat (teleserial), otherwise they would have known that not 6 but 7 maharathis were involved in the killing of Abhimanyu,” he said.

“The first chakravyuh is Congress which divided the country. The first Prime Minister was the second chakravyuh of Congress who gave the country the problem of Kashmir and gifted India’s land to China. The third chakravyuh was former Prime Minister IG who gave the country Emergency and unrest in Punjab. The country saw the fourth chakravyuh when former PM RG1 gave the country Bofors and massacred the Sikhs. The fifth chakravyuh was SG who created a narrative of hatred towards Sanatan tradition and patronised scams worth Rs 12 lakh crore. And the sixth chakravyuh is you who, in the last 15 years did so much damage to the country’s politics, parliamentary tradition and culture as the other 6 chakravyuhs combined could not do and I will not name the seventh chakravyuh, you all know it,” Thakur said.

Referring to Prime Minister Modi, Thakur said, “The Abhimanyu whom you have been trying to surround from Gujarat to Delhi for the last 22 years along with your warriors and your governments could not succeed because he lives in the hearts of the people of our country.”

He said that the Leader of Opposition should understand that the full form of LoP was not Leader of Propaganda and that OBC was not Only For Brother-In-Law Commission.