Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday asked how the followers of the martyred Birsa Munda could align with supporters of mercy seeker V.D. Savarkar, as the Congress battled the BJP for tribal votes in Gujarat.

“Birsa Munda, your icon, was given allurements by the British, but the brave 24-year-old fighter was committed to protecting the Adivasis’ interests. He fought with all his might and sacrificed his life,” Rahul told a tribal convention on Birsa Munda Jayanti at Tamsala on the Hingoli-Washim Road in Maharashtra, where the Bharat Jodo Yatra had stopped.

Birsa Munda (1875-1900) led a tribal movement against the British rulers in Bengal Presidency and died in jail.

“Savarkar is the RSS-BJP’s icon. After a few years in jail, he wrote to the British for mercy. He promised to be loyal to them if he was freed from prison,” Rahul said.

“The British said, ‘Come and work with us against Hindustan’. Savarkar came out and worked for the British. This is the difference between your icon and the RSS-BJP icon. The Adivasis must not abandon the path shown by Bhagwan Birsa Munda.”

While the Congress regularly attacks Savarkar, who had been an accused in Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination but was acquitted for lack of evidence, Rahul’s invocation of the saffron ideologue to assert an incompatibility between tribal communities and Hindutva is significant. The RSS has worked hard for decades to make inroads into tribal communities, and makes it a point to celebrate Birsa Munda Jayanti with great fanfare.

Although tribal communities had retained their political loyalty to the Congress for over half a century after Independence, the RSS project gradually began paying electoral dividends, bringing the BJP the majority of reserved tribal seats in several states, including Gujarat.

However, displacements because of development projects and dilution of the legal framework that protected their rights have angered tribal communities in Gujarat, giving the Congress hope in the three dozen constituencies where their vote holds the key.

The Congress knows that the RSS has deep roots in tribal areas. The Sangh parivar runs several outfits — such as the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, Ekal Vidyalaya, Sewa Bharati, Vivekananda Kendra, Bharat Kalyan Pratishthan and the Friends of Tribal Society —that promote education and welfare activities in tribal areas.

Rahul, therefore, took care to launch into all-round criticism of the Narendra Modi government, alleging its policies were an attack on Birsa Munda’s beliefs. He wondered why the RSS insisted on calling tribal communities “Vanvasi” rather than “Adivasi”.

“This is an attack on your identity. ‘Adivasi’ means ‘original inhabitant’, the original owners of land, and the RSSBJP won’t accept that. They call you ‘Vanvasi’, forest dweller,” he said.

He added: “In the next 50years, the forests will vanish. The country has taken from you and must give you back. The government should protect your rights and ensure that you get good education and health care. But education and health care are being recklessly privatised. You can’t pay for treatment in private hospitals. The Constitution, which protects your rights, is under threat.”

The RSS and the BJP have a fundamental problem with identifying the tribal communities as “Adivasi” because they believe that caste Hindus are the original inhabitants of the subcontinent. They refuse to accept that the tribal people have their own cultural and religious identities. Several tribal organisations have in the past protested against the RSS-BJP terms “Vanvasi” and“Vanbandhu” (friend of the forest) for them. The Constitution refers to them as Scheduled Tribes.