Unlike Gandhis, BJP Doesn't Expect Bonds Of Servitude: Smriti Irani To NDTV

Amethi, Uttar Pradesh: Amid reports that she may be the BJP's presumptive Chief Minister for Uttar Pradesh, union minister Smriti Irani was in Amethi today, where she told NDTV that her party will decide whether it will remain her constituency in 2019. In the last general election, she jolted the Congress with a tough fight to its Vice President Rahul Gandhi, in what has, for decades, been a family bastion.

It has been a one-sided relationship, Ms Irani said today, seated at a tea-stall, surrounded by enthusiastic party workers and locals. So negligent have the Gandhis been, the minister said, that even providing something as basic as a bus shelter -the reason for her visit- has fallen upon her.

Ms Irani, 40, said the Gandhis' relationship with their party is similarly and grossly unequal. Their "expectation of servitude", she said, is clear in the signed statement pledging loyalty to Sonia and Rahul Gandhi that was furnished this week by Congress legislators in Bengal after the party totaled huge losses in state elections.

The Congress has said that its central leadership and "high command"- party syntax for the Gandhis - did not seek the "loyalty bond" as it has been dubbed in caricature, but statement has not been derided as unnecessary or an over-reach of the sort of sycophancy that the party is grounded in.

The ruling party has been accused by critics of propagating a person's willingness to say "Bharat Mata Ki Jai" as a good measure of pride in being Indian. Muslim leader and parliamentarian Asaduddin Owaisi is among those who've said the slogan is not secular, they cannot be compelled to say it, and when they refuse, their patriotism cannot be questioned. Ms Irani asked the crowd surrounding her in Amethi if they feel coerced to say it. Not so, they responded noisily. "I am not here to certify anybody else's patriotism and nobody, irrespective of what kind of parliamentarian, can tell me that I possibly am a saffron demon for saying Bharat Mata Ki Jai," she said.

Ms Irani said similar charges that she is complicit in the "saffronization of education" are "water off a duck's back" to her. Opposition parties and a section of academics have accused her of taking orders from her party's ideological mentor, the Rashtyriya Swayamsewak Sangh or RSS, to revise textbooks for a right-wing slant and advocate a larger role for Sanskrit in schools and the country's premier engineering institutes, the IITs.

This approach, Ms Irani said, is "extremely myopic". Both the Left and the Congress, she said, "have never delivered on Indian languages" despite decades of shaping the education policies of the country.

There is a perception, she alleged, that "till you do not have these many pages dedicated to them (the Gandhi family), you are not secular enough", rejecting allegations that her ministry forced the removal of references to former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in textbooks in some states to marginalize a Congress stalwart.

States like Rajasthan are autonomous in deciding their curriculum, she said, adding that the flip side is that some textbooks describe Rahul Gandhi as "a charismatic leader".