Sakshi Maharaj, BJP MP

Sakshi Maharaj is at it again. The notorious Member of Parliament who has embarrassed the BJP time and again with his outlandish comments launched a fresh salvo on Wednesday when he decoded the reason for the Nepal earthquake. In an interaction with the media in Haridwar, he said, “Rahul Gandhi eats beef and goes to the holy shrine [of Kedarnath] without purifying himself. The earthquake was bound to happen.” The quake that struck Nepal on Saturday has claimed thousands of lives, with the cost of reconstruction assessed at around $10 billion.

But never mind these sundry trivialities; after loudly having proclaimed the need for every Hindu mother to bear at least four children and praised Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin as a patriot, Sakshi Maharaj was only engaged in a game of raising the political stakes in India.

Even as seismologists and other scientists probe the movement of continental plates that actually caused the earthquake, the MP deserves credit for sniffing out such an imaginative explanation that so conveniently goes with an extremely right-wing ideology that espouses beef bans and Gandhi-bashing. In any case, if true, then the good people of Maharashtra must be breathing easy; with the state’s ban on beef, they can at least be free of earthquakes.

BJP MPKedarnathNepal earthquakeRahul GandhiSakshi Maharaj