After US student says many Sajjan Kumars still in Congress fold, Rahul Gandhi says I take responsibility for everything party did wrong

Time of India

04-05-2025

Jalandhar: Seven months after he sought to put BJP in the dock while speaking in the US on the issue of religious freedom in India and cited the example of Sikhs while doing so, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi faced a question from a student in the US about what Sikhs faced during Congress rule in India.
The student mentioned that Rahul's party still had "many more Sajjan Kumars" in its fold. Gandhi, on his part, termed the happenings of the 1980s "wrong" and said he was more than happy to take responsibility for whatever mistakes Congress made in the past.
Gandhi held a question-and-answer session during at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs of Brown University, US, on April 21. A Sikh student was the first to pose a question, referring to Rahul's earlier remark made at an event in Virginia on Sept 9 last year. Rahul's conversation was uploaded on YouTube on Saturday, and it attracted a strong reaction from the BJP.
Mentioning Rahul's earlier remark that under BJP rule, the fight was about whether a Sikh would be allowed to wear his turban or a 'karra' (metal bangle), the Sikh student said, "You create a fear amongst the Sikhs about what the BJP would look like. But we just don't want to wear karras, we just don't want to wear turbans. We want freedom of expression, which under the Congress party in the past, has not been allowed," he said. He added, "For example, the
Anandpur Sahib resolution
, which you are probably familiar with, which talks about dalit rights, rights of water; it talks about better working conditions, anti-monopoly. It mentions nothing about separatism, but it is labelled as a separatist document."
"This is something your party has done, and your party seems to lack the maturity to accept the mistakes it has made, such as Sajjan Kumar just now being tried. There are many more Sajjan Kumars sitting in the Congress party. KPS Gill is hailed as a hero," he said. Then came his real question: "You tell us to fear what India will look like under the BJP, but you've never tried to reconcile with the Sikhs. What attempts are you making? Because if you continue like this, BJP is also going to make its way to Punjab."
Rahul replied, "First of all, I don't think that really anything scares the Sikhs. That is the first point. The statement I made was that: look, do we want an India where people are uncomfortable to express their religion? As far as the mistakes of the Congress party are concerned, a lot of those mistakes happened when I was not there. But I am more than happy to take responsibility for everything that the Congress party has ever done wrong in its history."
When the Sikh student again asked what he had done to reconcile with the Sikhs, the Congress leader added: "I have publicly stated that what happened in the '80s was wrong. I have been to the Golden Temple multiple times, I have an extremely good relationship with the Sikh community in India and a loving relationship with them."