Senior Congress leader and former minister Raja Pateria (Pateriya) was detained early on Tuesday from his residence in Hatta town of MP’s Damoh district in connection with his remarks exhorting people to ‘murder’ Prime Minister Narendra Modi in order to ‘save the Constitution’.

In the video that went viral, Pateria could be heard saying that “Modi will end elections. Modi will divide people on the basis of religion and jaati (caste). The future of Dalits, vanvas…adivasis, and minorities is under threat. If you want to save the save the Constitution, be ready to murder Modi…hatya (murder) in the sense of defeating him.”

The remarks were made while Pateria was addressing Congress workers in Pawai tehsil of Panna district.

Finding himself cornered, Pateria tried to offer clarifications. He said that he meant to say that ‘be ready to defeat PM Modi, if you want to save the constitution’. An FIR was registered against him on Monday.

After the backlash, Pateria said in a video, “I am a follower of Gandhi ji and Gandhi’s followers can not talk about murder. The video has been misinterpreted.”

Pateria, who is a vice president in the Pradesh Congress Committee, told The Indian Express that he was ‘misunderstood’ and that his idols are Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, BR Ambedkar, and Ram Manohar Lohiya. “My statement was misunderstood. I did not mean to literally kill the Prime Minister but to defeat him in elections. It was about defeating the government that is the supporter of (Nathuram) Godse’s ideology instead of Mahatma Gandhi’s,” he said.

Madhya Pradesh Congress president and former chief minister Kamal Nath has condemned his remarks and the party has issued him a show-cause notice.

Pateria was the state minister for technical education, medical education, and Information Technology from 1998 to 2003, in the Digvijaya Singh-led Congress government of MP. As per Indian Express, Pateria is often referred to as a leader with Samajwadi ideology and is believed to be a part of the Digvijaya Singh camp in the state Congress.

Usual secularist tropes & dreams

Pateria’s speech is not unusual for Bharat’s so-called ‘secular’ politicians and their left-liberal intellectual cheerleaders. A ‘sudden removal’ of Narendra Modi has been the dream of this class ever since they first identified his potential to challenge their Nehruvian consensus and cozy, back-scratching club. Karan Thapar was the first to use this language this after Modi’s 2007 Gujarat election win; later on, others like Quint columnists Suprateek Chatterjee & Vikas Malhotra were rather more direct in wishing for PM Modi’s death/assassination.

Of course, Pateria does say in the video that ‘by hatya (murder) I mean defeat him’ – but these are seasoned politicians who know a thing or two about double-speak and covering their tracks. Use of a word like ‘hathya’ for the sitting PM of the country cannot be brushed away so easily. Such language is deployed with a specific purpose, as a dog-whistle to those lower down the chain. It is also interesting to note that Pateria is a resident of Damoh, a district with 33% SC/ST population as per Census 2011 and known for predatory missionary proselytization. The damaged caused by the Maoist-missionary nexus in Bharat’s heartland is well documented, and Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati’s brutal murder in 2008 is a classic example of how such anti-Hindu forces can join hands with ‘secular’ blessings of Congress.

Pateria’s fear-mongering rhetoric also consists of standard tropes used by ‘secularists’ & self-avowed Gandhians”. Let’s deconstruct these –

1.) “Modi (read Hindutvawadis) will divide people on the basis of religion and caste”

This is the projection tactic aka ‘pot calling the kettle black’, which in psychology refers to placing your own negative traits or unwanted emotions onto others.

The very root of Indian secularism is to demonize and shame Hindu Dharma, while pandering to the most atavistic, supremacist and intolerant impulses of Abrahamic, so-called ‘minority’, religions. Hindus are gaslighted for being ‘Brahminical’ and ‘regressive’, while the harmonious coexistence between Hindus, belonging to diverse sampradayas, and other Dharmic paths like Jain, Sikh, Sarna etc are glossed over.

As for jaati, aka ‘caste’, nothing has entrenched caste consciousness in the political sphere more than India’s unique brand of secular-socialist politics. The very survival of Congress and its regional feudalist/dynastic offshoots depends on splintering Hindu society across caste fault-lines.

2.) “Dalit, adivasi, minorities are in danger”

This is the ultimate dream of all secular-socialist-communist politics: to build a social coalition of these 3 sections – often ‘bahujan’ (OBC) and women are thrown into the mix as well, to completely isolate Hindu general category males as the ‘villains of India’.

Dig a little deeper and this ‘coalition’ falls apart. The simplest thing is to look at our neighbors, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and see the persecution of ‘Dalits and adivasis’ at hands of Islamists. Within Bharat, it is these two communities who are the foremost targets of Islamist groomers, and evangelical conversion mafia.

In the video, Pateria first uses the term vanvasis for STs (scheduled tribes) but breaks in mid-word to label them adivasis instead. Read this article to understand why Congress is so desperate to promote the adivasi (which translates to original/eternal inhabitants) term. Such labelling is yet another gift of British colonizers and the brown-sahibs they trained and transferred power to. The idea draws inspiration from the false Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) propagated by Westerners to paint Hindus as ‘invading Aryans’ who ‘displaced indigenous tribals’.

The fact is – Bharatiya society has always consisted of vanvasis (forest dwellers), gramvasis (village dwellers) and nagarvasis (city dwellers) from time immemorial. Civilizations have flourished in various parts of the subcontinent for 1000s of years, and different communities have coexisted in far-greater harmony than seen in most other parts of the world. People denoted ‘tribals’ by British colonizers are actually the janjatis who have varied belief systems centered around nature, with overlapping ideas and deities shared with the larger Hindu society.

3.) “Save the Constitution“

This line has gained a lot of traction in the last 3-4 years, ever since it became clear that Modi’s popularity was no passing fad and that more and more Hindus are awakening to the fraud & hypocrisy of secularists.

Some other buzzwords & phrases used alongside this trope are – “constitutional morality”, “resist majoritarianism”, “save democracy”. The goal is to idealize and consecrate the Constitution as the holiest of all holy books, and to project the masses and their elected representatives as ‘unworthy’ of upholding the tenets of this exalted book.

The only class ‘enlightened and civilized’ enough to truly interpret the Constitution are the secularists, Supreme Court collegium and like-minded intellectuals. So what if the Constitution has undergone 100+ amendments (most of them under secularist Congress regimes), and the very Collegium that acts as the greatest defender of the Constitution today had overturned the Constitutional system of judicial appointments to introduce the Collegium system in 1993!

The basic crux of this line of thinking is this – people of Bharat exist to serve the Constitution, not the other way around.

The Gandhi card – last resort of the ‘secular’ neta

And finally, when everything else fails, secularists in this country play the Gandhi card. Even an Islamist (aka radical secularist) like Akbaruddin Owaisi, whose very party was a creation of the genocidal Razakars who murdered and raped thousands of Hindus to fulfill the Nizam of Hyderabad’s dream of joining Pakistan, starts considering Gandhi as ‘father of the nation’ when it suits him!

So Pateria pleading that he is a Gandhian and hence implicitly non-violent is just par for the course in our ‘secular’ politics. Even Maoist terrorists have been affectionately termed ‘Gandhians with guns‘ by some eminent Lutyens’ voices!

The Nehru-Gandhi clan which has ruled the country in Gandhi’s name for 55 years is responsible for some of the worst excesses of state power the country has witnessed, such as the 1948 Maharashtrian Brahmin massacre following Gandhi’s assassination, 1966 massacre of sadhus peacefully demonstrating for a cow slaughter ban, the Emergency crackdown etc.

But even Gandhi’s relation with ahimsa (‘non-violence’) is a troubled one. His principles on this and other topics were riddled with inconsistency and hypocrisy. Gandhi actively campaigned to garner Indian recruits for the British Imperial Army during WWI, he remained quiet or indirectly blamed Hindus for massacres perpetrated by Islamists in the wake of the disastrous Khilafat agitation, he denigrated warriors like Maharana Pratap & ran down revolutionaries as ‘misguided and dangerous patriots’, and his sermons to Hindus facing barbaric atrocities by Muslim League supporters from 1946 onwards are disturbing, to say the least. Gandhi’s ‘experiments’ involving his niece are not spoken of much, but would qualify as abuse even for the most liberal-minded judge.

No amount of emotional black-mailing or secularist breast-beating can hide the fact that Gandhi was no ‘Mahatma’ (great soul), but just a politician, albeit an important one, with more than his fair share of flaws.

For a civilization steeped in Dharma, in the idea of performing one’s duty and fighting Adharma/evil (including close family and friends who have chosen path of Adharma), it is time to reassess all 20th century figures dispassionately, and to derive inspiration primarily from the Dharmic icons that have guided us through the millennia.