NEW DELHI, November 8 (Aalimi Nation) – Congress leader Sonia Gandhi has described the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi as a mistake and said she cried while watching the 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid, in interviews given ahead of the release of her memoir, prompting sharp criticism from the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Ms Gandhi's memoir, titled Belonging: A Journey of Love, is due to be released on November 10. In an interview with a British newspaper, she said she believed Indira Gandhi was "a democrat at heart" but regarded the 1975 Emergency as an error, according to accounts of the interview. She said her husband, Rajiv Gandhi, had opposed it and urged his mother to wait for the next election, while Sanjay Gandhi had pushed for it.

Sonia Gandhi on the Babri demolition

On the events of December 1992, Ms Gandhi said she wept as she watched the demolition on television. She said she knew then that the country faced a "long battle for the secular nation that Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru and their colleagues had strived to build." Reflecting on her party's record, she also said: "I think we have been too complacent in many ways. There was a laissez-faire kind of an attitude."

In a separate interview with an English-language daily in India, she said the country's democratic fabric and institutions had suffered "great damage" over the past 12 years, since the National Democratic Alliance government took office in 2014, and that restoring them would need "great effort from political parties."

BJP hits back

BJP spokesperson Sudhanshu Trivedi reacted strongly to the remarks on Babri. "This shows that Babar was in the heart of the Congress party back then, and he remains in its heart even today," he said. He questioned which Indian television channel she had been watching that brought tears to her eyes, and said the party had moved from Mahatma Gandhi's "Ram Rajya" to "Babar Raj."

Rajya Sabha member Tarun Chugh said she should look at India without what he called "Italian lenses," and urged her to address the Bofors kickbacks and the Bhopal gas tragedy in her book. Party spokesperson Pradeep Bhandari accused her of vote-bank politics. The BJP has long described the Emergency as the "murder of democracy."

No response from the Congress to the BJP's criticism was available at the time of writing.

Memoir recalls Indira Gandhi's assassination

Ms Gandhi also spoke about the day Indira Gandhi was killed in 1984. She said she was at home when she heard what sounded like fireworks, rushed to the Prime Minister's nearby office and found her mother-in-law shot, and that the journey to hospital felt agonisingly slow.

Context

The Emergency, declared in June 1975 and lifted in March 1977, remains one of the most contested chapters in India's political history. Congress leaders have offered differing views on it over the years, and the party's own publications have previously described it as constitutionally valid while acknowledging administrative excesses.

With the book due out on November 10, more extracts and reactions are expected from both sides.