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Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has strongly protested the Southern Railway administration for making students render a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) anthem during the flagging off ceremony of the Ernakulam-Bengaluru Vande Bharat Express on Saturday. Southern Railway sparked controversy by posting a reel of the students’ recital on its Facebook page and Instagram accounts. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had inaugurated the train, the third Vande Bharat for Kerala, virtually from Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh. Union Minister of State for Petroleum and Tourism, Suresh Gopi, and senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders attended the function. ‘Breach of Constitution’ Mr. Vijayan accused the railways of breaching the Constitution. He stated that the railways had promoted the anthem of an organisation that fostered communal hatred and division, which contravened the Constitution’s fundamental principles of secularism, peaceful coexistence and social harmony. He said civil society would not acquiesce to the RSS’s bid to use the railways, the country’s most significant public sector utility, for promoting its brand of divisive communal politics and Hindu majoratarian worldview. The Chief Minister said the railways had made a mockery of itself by touting the RSS anthem on social media as a patriotic song. During the Independence Movement, Mr. Vijayan said, the railways were a symbol of national unity, serving the people across linguistic, geographical, and cultural boundaries. Mr. Vijayan said that, lately, the railways had been shielding the RSS, which, he claimed, had brazenly betrayed the Independence Movement and aided the colonial authorities by promoting their divide and rule policy. Mr. Vijayan said the inauguration was a manifestation of the RSS’s insidious agenda to inject Hindu majoratarian politics and Sangh Parivar iconography into State functions. Mr. Vijayan said the public would resist the forces which seek to undermine the nation’s secular and progressive founding principles. Earlier, at least two State government Ministers had stayed away from Raj Bhavan functions, objecting to Kerala Governor Rajendra Arlerkar paying public obeisance at the official events to the RSS’s image of Mother India as a woman bearing a saffron flag and sitting astride a lion against the backdrop of a disputed map of the country.
