Dr Pande himself had been a senior member of the ruling Congress party which he had joined at a very young age. He was a disciple of Gandhi, a friend of Nehru; he had taken part in each and every non-cooperation movement against the British and gone to jail eight times.
The Congress was supposed to be an all-Indian nationalist platform and yet Dr Pande's party was hardly free from the bias and ignorance of a cleverly deconstructed history. The rise of militant Hindutva tendency is only recent, but before it all became overt, the Congress itself was doing the same, albeit a little covertly.
All the horrific anti-Muslim carnage took place during more than four decades of Congress rule. The doors of the Babari Mosque were opened for Hindu worship during the tenure of Nehru's grandson, Rajiv Gandhi. The Mosque itself was pulled down during the regime of another Congress Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao.
