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Opposition asks Kalam to rethink Savarkar portrait unveiling >From Indo Asian News Service New Delhi, Feb 25 (IANS) In a rare show of unity, opposition parties Tuesday decided to boycott the unveiling in Parliament of a portrait Vinayak "Veer" Savarkar, a Hindu ideologue who is alleged to have inspired Mahatma Gandhi's assassination. In a joint appeal, opposition parties also urged President A.P.J Abdul Kalam to reconsider his decision to unveil the portrait in a function at the Central Hall of Parliament on Wednesday. In their appeal, opposition leaders expressed the resentment of "secular" parties on the decision taken by the government to unveil the portrait of a person "who was an accused in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. "The different parties in the opposition have decided not to associate with the function, which will give credibility to the activities and the divisive policies of Savarkar," said the opposition. Communist MP Somnath Chatterjee clarified the decision to boycott the function should not be taken as a "personal disrespect" to the president, but should be treated as a disassociation with a decision "in principle". Among the signatories to the letter are Somnath Chatterjee, Mulayam Singh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party and Rashid Alvi of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which heads the ruling coalition in Uttar Pradesh. Opposition parties have been protesting for the past few days against the government's move to glorify Savarkar, who is considered the Hindu counterpart of Mohammad Ali Jinnah in advocating the two-nation theory of separate Hindu and Muslim states. The confrontation began in a meeting of a parliamentary panel last week, in which the government was slammed for attempting to install a portrait of Savarkar just opposite Gandhi's. Savarkar, the opposition contends, was not the hero he is made out to be and that he more than once pleaded for clemency from the British colonial rulers. But Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's BJP maintains that Savarkar was a true revolutionary who in later years became a leading light of the Hindu Mahasabha and a bitter foe of Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress party. Savarkar is considered the fountainhead of the Hindu nationalist movement that spawned the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in 1925 and its political arm, the Jana Sangh, in 1951. The Jana Sangh in 1980 became the BJP. --Indo-Asian News Service _______________________________________________ Goanet mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.goanet.org/mailman/listinfo/goanet
