New Delhi: External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj yesterday applauded Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s gesture of presenting the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita to world leaders, saying the book has been elevated to the status of a national scripture.
She proposed the need for a formal announcement to this effect in order to officially establish the book’s status to that of a national scripture.
“Prime Minister Modi gifted the Bhagavad Gita to US President Barack Obama, which means it has already received the honour of a national scripture. What we require is only a formal announcement now to officially declare the Gita as a national scripture,” Sushma Swaraj said in a public meeting to commemorate 5,151 years of the Bhagavad Gita at the Red Fort.
The pitch for declaring the Gita as a national holy book provoked the Trinamool Congress to say the Constitution was the “holy book” in a democracy.
“Our Constitution says India is a secular country. The Constitution is the Holy Book in a democracy,” the Trinamool wrote on Twitter.
Congress leader Manish Tewari said: “If anybody has seriously read and internalised the teachings of the Gita, they would not make such a frivolous statement,” he said.
The Left Front chairman and CPI-M politburo member Biman Bose termed it “nothing but yet another attempt to implement the ideologies of RSS and Hindutva in the country”.Agencies
