MUMBAI: “If India is not secular, then India is not India at all,” asserts Sudheendra Kulkarni.
In a TVi interview Kulkarni who had worked with former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani for 16-year long years Kulkarni has been critical of the BJP functioning for a long time.
In an interview with India Today he said, “BJP has deviated from its own culture and ideology and idealism, not just in the sense that it is calling its opponents anti-nationals. It has also deviated by completely marginalizing its founding fathers like L K Advani ji and Murli Manohar Joshi ji.”
He mentioned this before the commencement of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
He is certainly not the first leader to break camp with the party due to the current trajectory it has taken.
Since 2017, many a person of the Vajpayee camp such as Yashwant Sinha have vociferously attacked the direction in which Modi has steered their party and the Indian nation.
Former advisor to the Sinha who was the Union Minister during the NDA government, Mohan Guruswamy, also had his Facebook account suspended allegedly due to his criticism towards the Prime Minister and Home Minister.
Kulkarni stressed the fact that not a political force but collective conscience of ordinary Indians is driving this agitation that too, without lambasting the opposition for failing to adequately protect the secular nature of this country.
“Forget the opposition, don’t you see that this is a party-less movement?” he inquired to a reporter who brought up the opposition’s lackadaisical efforts to combat the current ruling dispensation.
Besides the Vajpayee-associated figures, Kirti Azad and Arun Shourie have gone on the record to express their disagreements with the Modi-Shah regime.