What Priyanka Gandhi meant when she told BJP: ‘Learn from us on Emergency, you too apologise’

It’s not the first time Congress leaders have spoken about the Emergency. Several, including Gandhi family members, have admitted it was “wrong”.

In March 2021, now Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi said the Emergency was a “mistake”.

During a virtual conversation with Professor Kaushik Basu of Cornell University, the Congress MP said: “I think that was a mistake. Absolutely, that was a mistake. And my grandmother (Indira Gandhi) said as much.”

However, he went on to add that “at no point” did the Emergency “attempt to capture India’s institutional framework”.

“Our (Congress) design doesn’t allow us that, even if you want to do it, we cannot do it.”

Earlier, over a decade ago, then Congress president Sonia Gandhi, who was close to Indira Gandhi, also admitted the mistake of the move.

In a conversation with then Editor-in-Chief of The Indian Express Shekhar Gupta, for NDTV 24×7, in May 2004, Sonia had said that her mother-in-law “did think (afterwards) that it was a mistake.”

“Well my mother-in-law herself after she lost the election (in 1977), she did herself say that… She had a rethink on that (the Emergency). And the very fact that she declared the election means that she had a rethink on the Emergency,” she said.

She went on to add, “Do not forget that the Indira Gandhi I knew was a democrat at heart… And I think circumstances compelled her to take that action, but she was never quite at ease with it.”

Asked whether the Emergency was part of conversations at home, Sonia said: “I cannot recall a particular instance. But I remember that at times she was uneasy about it.”

Asked about the forced sterilization programme during the Emergency, Sonia said “there is no way that we can say that the Emergency was right”.

“… But there was a great deal of campaign against nasbandi (forced sterilisation) deliberately done… Yes, there were things that ought not to have done but not to the scale which the Opposition and which other parties had built up”.

Asked whether it was a lesson that no government should do it again, she said “yes certainly, but added “those were different times”.

What other Congress leaders said

In 2011, the Congress brought together a group of historians to publish a volume on the party’s history to commemorate its 125th anniversary.

Former president Pranab Mukherjee wrote in its preface that the party desired the volume to generate an “objective and scholarly perspective for the period under review” and “not necessarily have a party perspective”. Historians such as Inder Malhotra and Bipan Chandra spoke of the Emergency period extensively in the volume and even hit out at the Congress.

In 2014, Mukherjee wrote a book titled The Dramatic Decade: The Indira Gandhi Years, in which he called the Emergency a misadventure.

“Suspension of fundamental rights and political activity (including trade union activity), large scale arrests of political leaders and activists, press censorship, and extending the life of legislatures by not conducting elections were some instances of Emergency adversely affecting the interests of the people. The Congress and Indira Gandhi had to pay a heavy price for this misadventure,” wrote Mukherjee.

However, he said Indira Gandhi was not aware of the constitutional provisions that allowed for the Emergency.

“It is believed that (senior Congress leader) Siddhartha Shankar Roy played an important role in the decision to declare the Emergency… It was his suggestion, and Indira Gandhi acted on it. In fact, Indira Gandhi told me subsequently that she was not even aware of the constitutional provisions allowing for the declaration of a state of Emergency on grounds of internal disturbance, particularly since a state of emergency had already been proclaimed as a consequence of the Indo-Pak conflict in 1971,” he had written.

“Siddhartha babu had been very close to Indira Gandhi ever since the days of the Congress split in 1969… As a member of the CWC and Central Parliamentary Board, Siddhartha babu had considerable influence over the decision-making process of the organisation and administration,” he had written.

In 2015, then Congress leader Jyotiraditya Scindia said that the imposition of Emergency was a “mistake” and what happened during the period was “wrong.”

“What happened in the Emergency is wrong. Let us not go back and forth on it. What happened in the Sikh riots (of 1984, under a Congress government) is wrong. Any loss of life in this country, irrespective of which government is in power, we need to come out and say what is right is right and what is wrong is wrong,” Scindia said.

In June this year, also amidst conversation in Parliament over the Emergency, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said the Emergency was “undemocratic” but not “unconstitutional”.

“I am a critic of the Emergency, but the very fact is that it may have been undemocratic but it was not unconstitutional. A provision of the Constitution permitted the imposition of internal emergency. That provision has since been removed,” Tharoor told NDTV in an interview.