BJP slams RJD for ‘coffin’ dig at new Parliament building

New Delhi/Patna, May 28 (PTI) The Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) on Sunday likened the architecture of the new Parliament building to a coffin, drawing a sharp response from the BJP, which said, people will bury the Bihar party in such a coffin in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.

As the new building was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the ruling party in Bihar put out a tweet that showed a coffin and the new legislature building side by side and asked, “What is this?”

The BJP’s Bihar unit responded to the tweet saying, “The first picture is your future and the second is of India. Understood?”

BJP spokesperson Shehzad Poonawalla termed RJD’s tweet “disgusting”, while another spokesperson Gaurav Bhatia said the coffin belongs to the RJD and Parliament to the country.

“This is the level to which they have fallen. Disgusting. This will prove to be the final nail in the coffin of RJD’s politics. Trikon or Tribhuj (triangles) has much significance in Indian system. By the way, the coffin is hexagonal or has six sided polygon,” Poonawalla said on Twitter.

Bhatia said, “Today is a historic moment and the country is proud. You are merely a ‘Nazarbattu’ (a symbol to ward off evil eye) and nothing else. Keep beating your chest.”

“In 2024, the people of the country will bury you in this coffin and will not even give you a chance to enter the temple of new democracy. Let it also be decided that the coffin is yours and Parliament of the country,” he said, using the hashtag “MyParliamentMyPride”.

Referring to the RJD’s tweet, senior BJP leader and former president of the Bihar unit of the saffron party Sanjay Jaiswal, in a video statement, said, this act of the ruling party is highly “condemnable”.

“This has exposed their mindset that the RJD does have any regard for Parliament, the supreme law-making institution in the country .it shows that they don’t believe in parliamentary democracy,” he said.

Without naming any RJD leader, Jaiswal said they believe that “their father and mother can only hold the posts of chief minister or prime minister”.

“The tweet is highly condemnable and totally uncalled for,” he said.

Echoing Jaiswal, Bihar BJP spokesperson Nikhil Anand said, “It’s most condemnable that RJD had compared the new Parliament House with a coffin. The politics of the Grand Alliance led by the Congress and the politics of RJD and JD(U) will be buried in the same coffin.”

He also alleged that the Congress and all its allies, especially RJD-JD(U), are “insulting democracy and democratic historical heritage”.

“All these parties will be pushed into its coffin and they won’t exist in the future,” he said.
However, justifying the RJD’s tweet, its Bihar unit spokesperson Mrityunjay Tiwary told PTI, “The way the new Parliament building was inaugurated today, it showed that democracy was buried. Neither the President nor the Vice President, who is the chairman of the Rajya Sabha, were invited to the function. This does not happen in a democracy.”

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s JD(U) and RJD had already announced that they would boycott the inaugural function of the new Parliament building.

The JD(U) also declared that it would observe a day-long fast here on Sunday to protest against the inauguration of the new Parliament building by PM Modi.

Soon after the inauguration, PM Modi hoped that the iconic building becomes a cradle of empowerment, igniting dreams and nurturing them into reality.

“May it propel our great nation to new heights of progress”, the prime minister said.