NEW DELHI: Union Minister Jitendra Singh on Wednesday said Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the BJP’s ideologue, was the most underrated leader of post-independence India.
Speaking at a national webinar on “The Monuments of Culture and Patriotism and their significance” to mark the death anniversary of Mookerjee, he said history has been unfair to this illustrious son of India.
The seminar was organised by the National Monuments Authority of India under its chairman, Tarun Vijay.
“Mookerjee was the most underrated leader of the post-independence India. He was also the most underrated academician of the 20th century. At the age of barely 33, he became the vice-chancellor of Calcutta University in that glorious era of education in Bengal,” said Singh, the Minister of State for Personnel.
He said, India lost the three stalwarts — Sardar Patel, Dr B R Ambedkar and Mookerjee — within a few years of independence.
“Had they lived longer, India could have been saved of the infamous Nehruvian blunders that happened subsequently,” the minister said.
Referring to Mookerjee’s movement for “Ek Vidhan, Ek Nishan, Ek Pradhan”, Singh recalled that it is the Kathua region where Mookerjee had courted arrest after having entered the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir without obtaining a permit, so that a message could go across the country that Jammu and Kashmir was as much a part of India as any other state of the Indian Union.
He said, in a fittest tribute to the illustrious son of India, Asia”s longest bi-directional highway tunnel, the ”Chenani-Nashri Highway Tunnel” between Udhampur and Ramban in Jammu and Kashmir has been named after him.
This was India”s first major project of the central government to be named after Mookerjee in seventy years, Singh said. (Agency)
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