Constitution facing existential crisis, says Kharge

New Delhi, November 26

In a major offensive against the BJP and RSS, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge on Saturday said the Constitution was in an “existential crisis” with growing disharmony between people and states. He said India was “no longer a collaborative federal nation”.

In a sharply worded statement on the Constitution Day, Kharge said ideological moral strength was the only way to “fight the BJP and RSS’ hegemonic disposition”.

“On what should be a proud day for us all, we are witnessing the onset of what Baba Saheb would have referred to as “lawless law”, riddled with never-ending infringements on fundamental rights, systematically engineered by the BJP-RSS government since they have been in power…. A Constitution that stood the test of time for over seven decades faces a fundamental crisis, an existential crisis,” he said. Kharge alleged that the crisis had roots in the RSS’s expanding reach within state institutions and “the electoral (and by extension judicial) legitimacy of its ideology, with the BJP being in power since 2014”.

The government has completely surrendered itself and its institutions to the diktats of the RSS, and it is no longer incorrect to use the terms RSS and BJP interchangeably, the Congress chief said.

Noting that with the Bharat Jodo Yatra, Congress had embarked on a mission to unite India, Kharge said “the only way to control this new hegemonic disposition is to counter it with ideological and moral strength”.

Launching an all-out attack, the Congress chief accused the Sangh of using the BJP to curtail constitutional freedoms.