The Congress’s fusillade against the remark by Mohan Bhagwat, the chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, that India achieved its “true independence” on the day of the consecration of the Ram temple, was, unsurprisingly, led by Rahul Gandhi. In a stinging rebuttal, the Congress leader said that the Bharatiya Janata Party and its ideological parent, the RSS, had captured the nation’s institutions and that only the Congress had the ideological robustness to wage a battle not only against the sangh parivar but also the “Indian State” by which Mr Gandhi presumably meant institutions partisan towards and peopled by the ruling regime. The equation of the State with one party may seem preposterous. But the charge of the parivar’s imprint on many an edifice cannot be labelled as specious. New India, after all, is witness to a sitting judge mouthing prejudicial remarks against a minority community; elected politicians brazenly spouting communal rhetoric; chapters and texts pertaining to, say, Mughal rulers or M.K. Gandhi getting summarily excised from the educational curriculum — the list of acts of omission by institutional representatives is long.

The BJP’s enthusiasm to highlight Mr Gandhi’s reference to the Congress battling the Indian State is meant to drill into the public consciousness the image of the Congress leader as a negative, destabilising force. But the BJP's response must be called out for what it is — a diversionary tactic meant to distract attention from Mr Bhagwat’s outrageous statement that was disrespectful not only towards India’s glorious struggle for freedom from colonial rule but also to the architects of that movement — the nation’s freedom fighters. Mr Bhagwat was, of course, living up to the RSS’s reputation. The organisation bears the shameful record of having maintained a careful distance from the Independence movement. Even after Independence, the RSS had refused to hoist the Tricolour for a period of over five decades after 1950. Its commitment to religious majoritarianism also goes against one of the foundational tenets of India’s Constitution — that of a secular polity. The leader of a quasi-political and ideological apparatus that never misses an opportunity to crow about its credentials as a nationalist force showing disrespect to the most important date on the national calendar must count as more than an irony. It is an ignominious act that every patriotic Indian must criticise wholeheartedly. The greater — collective — task, however, is to fortify the national consciousness from the regressive, revisionist points of view of the kind periodically aired by Mr Bhagwat and the sangh parivar.