‘Cong made Sanjay scapegoat’
Likening the Emergency era with the “Nazi rule,” BJP Parliamentary Party chairman L.K. Advani on Sunday said the Congress has made a “ridiculous attempt” of making its late leader Sanjay Gandhi a “scapegoat” for all the “misdeeds the country had to suffer during the Emergency.” Sanjay Gandhi’s son Varun and wife Maneka are BJP MPs. Mr Advani was reacting to the recently released book by the Congress, commemorating 125 years of its existence.
Holding the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi responsible for the Emergency, Mr Advani, writing on the issue in his blog, said: “Without consulting her Cabinet, or even her law minister and home minister, she (Indira Gandhi) made President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed invoke Article 352 to put democracy under indefinite suspension. The Congress Party publication indicates that the party regrets only the ‘excesses’ committed during the Emergency, because Sanjay Gandhi promoted worthwhile causes such as slum clearance, anti-dowry measures, and literacy, but in an arbitrary and authoritarian manner.”
Mr Advani, who was in jail for several months during the Emergency, maintained that Indira Gandhi could not bear the Allahabad high court verdict which indicted her for electoral corruption and decided to clamp Emergency.
He said whenever the executive finds anything “unpalatable” in a judicial verdict it tries to make changes by mobilising legislative support but Indira Gandhi “did not stop there”.
“I hold that promulgation of the Emergency itself was an unforgivable crime against Democracy and that the constitution makers had never ever conceived that any Prime Minister of independent India would so grossly abuse Article 352 of the Constitution,” Mr Advani said.
He said the Congress has “admitted” that more than one lakh persons were jailed during the Emergency.
“The exact number was 1,10,806. Of these 34,988 were detained under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act whereunder no grounds were to be given to the prisoner,” he wrote in his blog.
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