The Congress party has ratcheted up its opposition to Rijiju, labelling his assertion that Gandhi’s Andaman Sea scuba foray set them back Rs 26 crore as nothing but misinformation. They see it as a smokescreen to take the heat off the Great Nicobar Project and something that could put off tourists to the Andamans.
Why the Rs 26 crore remark matters
“Rijiju has made himself the ‘Minister for Defamation’,” said Manickam Tagore, a Congress MP, dismissing the number as preposterous and a way to sidestep the real issues with the Great Nicobar plan. In his view, you don’t make a normal tourist pastime sound like a multi-crore affair and expect to be taken seriously by visitors. Tagore put the onus on the minister to explain where he got such a figure. He tied it to the kind of unease people have when national assets are ceded to big business, making the point that you can’t have development at the expense of the ecology or people’s livelihoods.
Political stakes rise as environment meets optics
Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi has been hard on the Great Nicobar proposal ever since he was there in late April. He has no time for it, calling it "one of the biggest scams” and a crime against the country’s tribal and natural heritage. That has put the islands in the political spotlight. Then on 5 June, World Environment Day, he put out a 16-minute video of his time in the Andamans, some of it underwater. In it, he was direct: the government is “taking away the land of Tribal communities by violating the Forest Rights Act”, and he made sure the ecological angle was front and centre.
Rijiju’s charge and Congress’s counter
At a get-together in the Andamans, Rijiju latched onto the scuba footage to make his case: “Behind that one scuba diving, an expenditure of Rs 26 crore was made.” He put it down to an “entire ecosystem” of propaganda tying the dive to environmental woe. “But people now know everything. You cannot come to power, so why do you want to destroy the country’s growth, assets and our future?” he said. Tagore had an easy retort: scuba is what you do in these parts, and does every diver have to be written off as a crorepati?
How the row unfolded
There was a build-up to this. With his 5 June video, Gandhi put the rights of the tribes and the environment right in the middle of his case against the project, and the coral reefs were on display for all to see.
A few weeks later, on 20 June, Rijiju was in town for the Viksit Bharat Sankalp Sammelan and let the 26 crore number fly, even showing some of his own clips from Swaraj Island. By the 22nd, Congress was saying the minister was just trying to turn heads.
The project at the centre of dispute
You can talk about a video and a price tag, but the rub is the Great Nicobar. Gandhi says 15 million trees are in the chopper, that coral has been made to disappear from the maps, and the whole area is four times the size of New Delhi. His camp will tell you that if you let your guard down, the ecology and the local people are in trouble. The government is all for the project as a driver of growth, but of late Rijiju has been more interested in nipping the “propaganda” in the bud than going into the nitty-gritty of the plan.
Tourism, credibility, and what comes next
Now Congress is fighting on two levels: to protect the image of the Andaman and Nicobar for tourism and to put a stop to any idea that public resources are being given away to corporations. “Andaman and Nicobar Islands are not for sale,” Tagore put it, and he wants some straight answers, not more of what he calls spin. Here is where things stand: – Rijiju is on record with the Rs 26 crore for a single dive. – Congress says it’s a lie and a ploy to look elsewhere. – Gandhi is alleging the government is on the wrong side of the law and the environment. What happens from here is a matter of politics. With the finger-pointing, we can anticipate some hard-hitting words on the legality and the cost. Will the government put the 26 crore claim to rest or double down on the project? That will be telling. For the people who live there, the divers and the conservationists, this is very real. The pull between what is good for the economy and what is right for the environment in the Andamans is not some theoretical debate anymore; it is a test of who is in charge and what they stand for.
