CHENNAI: India will be secular as long as it is a Hindu-majority State, announced Member of Parliament and BJP leader Rakesh Sinha, speaking at the second and final day of ThinkEdu Conclave 2019 on Thursday. He was a part of the panel discussing ‘Are we creating liberals, nationalists or Urban Naxals of Young India?’.

In a politically-charged debate spanning an hour, national spokesperson for the Indian National Congress Khushbu Sundar, filmmaker and author Vivek Agnihotri (in pic) and Sinha, along with senior journalist Kaveere Bamzai, discussed the various labels and prejudices that come with them. 

According to him, secularism needed a little tweaking, “Without Indianisation, the original form of Islam or Christianity will not be able to serve the secular purpose of the country,” he said. And when things are as charged as this panel was the issue of cows can never be too far away, “Those who worship cows are, in a way, animal activists and are the most liberal. Beef eaters, on the other hand, are the ones who display the highest level of intolerance,” he added. 

Drawing from his ‘bad experiences’ in universities like the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Agnihotri said that educational institutions are ‘infested’ with the Maoist ideology today. On his controversial ‘Urban Naxal’ comment, he said that he did not understand why people felt the need to jump on the defensive because he was not pointing fingers at anyone specifically.

Sparked by a question from the audience on Rahul Gandhi’s ‘increased’ visit to temples of late, Khushbu and Agnihotri got into a debate surrounding the furore over Gandhi’s gotra. “It is fake news. How can Rahul Gandhi have a gotra when his father and grandfather were not Hindus?” said Agnihotri.