Rahul with those who want to break India: Arun Jaitley

Vrindavan: Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Sunday launched a stinging attack on Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi for voicing "sympathies" for "those who raised slogans for breaking up India". The senior BJP leader also termed JNU Students Union leader Kanhaiya Kumar's speech, delivered following his release on bail, a "victory for us", saying he had gone to jail for raising anti-India slogans but came back to speak amid slogans of 'Jai Hind' and hoisting of the Tricolour.

In his valedictory address to a convention of the Bhartiya Janata Yuva Morcha, BJP's youth wing, Mr Jaitley said it was the country's "misfortune" that the Congress vice president sympathised with the actions of a "small group of Jihadists and a bigger group of Maoists." The Congress had always been against those wanting to break up the country through the last 100 years of struggle between nationalist and anti-national forces, Jaitley said in his attack against Gandhi.

"A new trend has started. Some people want to hold an event to commemorate Yakub Memon and some to commemorate Afzal Guru. These people used to comprise a small section of jihadists and a big group of Maoists," Jaitley said. ‘Kanhaiya an aberration, not a hero’ Union Minister Rajiv Pratap Rudy Kanhaiya is an "aberration" and not a hero, while asserting that the Left parties were taking refuge in universities, media and NGOs.

"Left parties have disintegrated in most parts of the world. They have no place in the political scene and as such are moving to the media, universities and NGOs," Rudy said. "It is through these that they are trying to influence the minds of the people," he said. Asked if the NDA government at the Centre was mulling any change in laws pertaining to sedition, he said, "There are already enough laws in the country and the final interpretation of these are with the judiciary."

A week after threatening to behead those who raised pro-Pakistan slogans, Bengal BJP chief Dilip Ghosh has warned Jadavpur university students that if they dare to step out of campus, he would have them thrashed. "The Jadavpur University students are sitting inside campus and shouting slogan. I dare them to come out," Ghosh said at a meeting in Sundarbans.

"We will thrash them so the forget their ancestors' names. You will eat food here and shout 'Pakistan Zindabad'? We shall beat you with shoes and straighten you up," he went on to add.