NEW DELHI: Congress on Thursday lashed out at the governing BJP over Rajya Sabha Secretariat’s directive to MPs not to use slogans like ‘Vande Mataram’ and ‘Jai Hind’ in Parliament in order to maintain decorum. In a veiled reference to RSS, the party alleged that the people who did not join the freedom movement and were aligned with the British are objecting to the slogans that were anathema to the colonial masters.AICC spokespersonSupriya Shrinate said, “I am shocked. What on earth is the objection to these slogans – the British had a problem with them, and now the BJP folks have too? What kind of people are they, who find it difficult to utter the two most famous slogans of the freedom struggle in the House?”She said that after 1947, ‘Jai Hind’ was adopted by the Indian armed forces as their official greeting, while ‘Vande Mataram’, besides being the national song, is a slogan that gives India the status of a mother. Shrinate said the British repeatedly banned ‘Vande Mataram’ between 1906 and 1910 and arrested the Indians who sang it.
