The Assam Congress on Sunday filed a complaint against Kamakhya Prasad Tasa, a Bharatiya Janata Party MP from Jorhat, for allegedly comparing the ideas propagated by Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi with garbage, IANS reported.

“The Congress has pushed the Nehru-Gandhi garbage in the minds of people over the years, and there is now no space for other theory,” Tasa reportedly said at a public rally in Sivsagar district on Saturday. Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal was also present at the event.

The Congress claimed that the Lok Sabha MP from Jorhat should be arrested for making defamatory remarks. The party staged protests in Guwahati on Sunday and burnt effigies of him. “The MP...described Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi as garbage,” the FIR read, according to IANS. “Therefore, we seek his immediate arrest and prosecution under the Criminal Procedure Code.”

Assam Congress unit president and Rajya Sabha MP Ripun Bora said Tasa should apologise for insulting Mahatma Gandhi. “Even United Nations observes October 2 as non-violence day,” The Times of India quoted Bora as saying. “Tasa’s comment has insulted the two most respected figures of India’s freedom struggle. It shows how poor his knowledge is on the history of India’s freedom movement.”

Tasa, however, claimed that he was wrongly interpreted, and that he did not make defamatory remarks against Nehru and the Gandhis. “I have never taken the names of Nehru and Gandhi in the manner it has been projected,” he told The Telegraph. “I said a lot of garbage has been drilled in the names of Nehru and Gandhi.”

He added that he was only referring to the Gandhi family and not Mahatma Gandhi, as he could never be “so insensitive” to the father of the nation.