Lalu Prasad lambasts Raj Thackeray, Mohanrao Bhagwat

PATNA: RJD chief and former Union minister Lalu Prasad on Sunday came heavily on RSS chief Mohanrao Bhagwat and described him as 'derailed' and 'out of sync with the time' for his qualification of increasing incidents of rape in various parts of the country, including of Nirbhaya, in terms of 'India' and Bharat'.
At the same time, Lalu said the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) chief Raj Thackeray's claim that Biharis should be blamed for the increasing instances of rape was both 'dirty and divisive'.Incidentally, one of the six accused in the Delhi rape case hails from Aurangabad district in Bihar.
"These RSS people - all have got derailed. They call themselves as followers of high sounding 'sanskriti (culture)' and also teach lessons in Bharatiya (Indian) culture, but make such utterances. They are derailed," Lalu said.
Last week, Bhagwat was at Silchar in Assam, where he, as reported earlier, described occurrence of rape in the country in terms of 'India' and 'Bharat', implying that rape was prevalent mostly in cities where Indians were deeply influenced by western values and not by the ethos of rural India. He said, "Such crimes hardly take place in 'Bharat', but they occur frequently in 'India'."
However, the subsequent media reports have singularly faulted him as the statistics showed that the incidents of rape were endemic to rural areas of various states.
Lalu said the assertion or observation made by Bhagwat was, in fact, misplaced. According to him, the phenomenon of increasing instances of rape had to be seen and handled in terms of 'male' psychology and drive. Further, the provisions of the IPC, right from the colonial period, had seen the incidents of rape as a result of 'male' drives, he added.
Lalu also came heavily on Thackeray for blaming Biharis for the incidents of rape. "It is highly reprehensible to see incidents of rape, or any crime, in terms of Bihari, Punjabi, Marathi, or any regional identity. The entire population of a state cannot be blamed for any crime committed by one person from that particular state," Lalu said.
A Bihari student having passed out from an engineering college in Odisha was killed in one of the towns there when he had gone on a holiday trip, an incident about which people of Bihar have expressed their serious concerns. "All the people of a state should never be held guilty when any crime takes place there. What Thackeray has said is divisive and it is his old game that he has been playing," Lalu said.