Motormouth BJP politician and Union Skill Development Minister Anant Kumar Hegde on Thursday courted another controversy by claiming that intellectuals don’t understand the meaning of ‘antar atma’.Addressing the media at an event, Hedge said that for such people (intellectuals) there was no difference between a living human and a dead body.
“So called intellectuals don’t understand ‘antar atma’, for them there is no difference between a living human and a dead body as both have same body parts. These people think fulfilling the needs of the human body is only what life is all about. For intellectuals life was all about fulfilling the needs of the human body,” Indian Express quoted Hegde as saying.
However, this is not the first time that Hegde has made a controversial statement. Earlier in January, while attending a Skill India event in Belagavi region of Karnataka, the minister had mocked poets and writers saying,”They call themselves intellectuals because they want government sites (a reference to allocated properties). We are supposed to assume what they write is literature and poetry.”
In another public event, he had compared the Opposition to ‘barking dogs’. Hegde had also claimed that an Indian flew the first aircraft before the Wright brothers did in the early 1900s.
Recently, he had grabbed headlines by comparing Opposition parties to ‘crows, monkeys and foxes’ who are uniting to take on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Lok Sabha polls in 2019.
“On one side crows, monkeys, foxes and others have come together; while on the other side we have a tiger (Modi). In 2019, choose to elect the tiger,” Hegde urged the audience to vote carefully for the upcoming elections.