New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday attacked the Congress for having "abandoned" the memory of Chettur Sankaran Nair - a lawyer and freedom fighter from Kerala, who resigned as the sole Indian on the Viceroy's Executive Council after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919.
"They abandoned a brave nationalist because he didn't fit their narrative..." the PM said, declaring that every child in Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, and Punjab should know about Sankaran Nair.
He also accused the Congress of having sidelined Sankaran Nair and other freedom fighters from its history, including Dr BR Ambedkar, over whose legacy there is a perennial political squabble.
The Congress, the Prime Minister declared, deliberately buried the contributions of people like Mr Nair and Dr Ambedkar to play up the image of the Gandhi family as leaders of the struggle.
The Prime Minister's swipe followed a lengthy X post by the BJP's Rajeev Chandrasekhar.
The newly installed boss of the party's Kerala unit accused the Congress of hiding senior freedom fighters from the party to serve the interests of the "dynasty", referring to the Gandhi family.
"One more example of how the Congress airbrushes leaders....to humour the dynasty," he said, "As a Malayalee, I believe it is shameful the way he has been neglected..."
The Congress has not yet responded to these attacks.
The criticism came days before the release of Akshay Kumar's 'Kesari: Chapter 2' - a courtroom drama about Mr Nair and his case against Michael O'Dwyer, the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab at the time.
In his book, Gandhi And Anarchy, Mr Nair criticised Mr O'Dwyer for fomenting the massacre through his repressive administration. A libel suit was filed in a London court, in which Mr Nair defended himself.
Akshay Kumar's new movie is based on that case. In real life, Mr Nair failed, unsurprisingly, to sway a British judge in a British court that a British subject had abused and mistreated 'slaves of the Empire'.
But rather than acknowledge he had 'defamed' Mr O'Dwyer, Mr Nair paid 500 pounds in damages.
The spotlight on Sankaran Nair, meanwhile, also comes with the next Assembly election in Kerala - a state that has historically rejected the BJP - less than a year away.
In the 2021 Assembly election the BJP contested 113 of 140 seats but failed to win any. And, in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, the party contested 16 of the state's 20 seats and scored just one.
In each case, though, the BJP will point to marginal increases in vote share as progress; in 2021 it improved by 0.77 per cent and, in 2024, it got 3.7 per cent more votes than the last general election.
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