‘Sidelined’ at BJP event, Gurugram MP Rao Inderjit slams organisers, storms off stage

Union Minister of State and Gurugram MP Rao Inderjit Singh turned a ‘Partition Horrors Remembrance Day’ event into a dressing-down of its organisers, declaring on stage that he would not have been invited if BJP national president Nitin Nabin and party state president were not present, even though he was the region’s sitting MP.

He claimed that his name was not on the list of speakers scheduled to address the gathering, and pointed to a near-identical snub at an earlier event in Bawal, where neither his name nor the local MLA’s name featured on the invitation. Furious, he cut his remarks short and walked off, handing back the mic and leaving leaders and organisers on stage stunned.

Talking about regional politics, he took a swipe at those invoking the Punjabi community for electoral gain. “Let Punjabis contest purely in the name of being Punjabi, we’ll see how many votes they get,” he said, pointing out that of Gurugram’s 36 councillors, only two were Punjabi, and the lone candidate who contested on community lines managed only 48,000 votes and lost.

He said the support of “36 biradaris” — not the Punjabi community alone — had made Manohar Lal Khattar the CM.

He also said Partition’s legacy belonged to every community, not just one. Every caste, he said, had either suffered during Partition or welcomed with open arms those who had migrated. The migrants who arrived after 1947 were now almost entirely gone, and their descendants, born and raised in the state, were Haryanvis, he stated.

At being “sidelined”, he issued a warning: “It takes two hands to clap, remember that.” He escalated the complaint directly to Nabin, reopening the rift within the party’s Ahirwal unit.

As he pressed on, a local marshal was seen tugging at his ‘kurta’, in an attempt to get him to wind it up, forcing Rao Inderjit to remark that he was being told to stop speaking. He then abruptly signed off.

Meanwhile, the absence of CM Nayab Singh Saini, who skipped the function, did not go unnoticed, even as the MP invoked PM Narendra Modi’s stated vision for the day — that all ‘biradaris’ come together to mark the occasion.

Nabin, in his address, said the day was meant to connect coming generations with the horrors of 1947 and strengthen national unity. Khattar said the tragedy deserved a place in the national curriculum.