Congress continues to shield terror ecosystem: BJP slams Aiyar's comment on Pahalgam attack
NEW DELHI: The BJP on Sunday came out strongly against the Congress over veteran leader Mani Shankar Aiyar's comment on the
Congress leader and former Union minister Mani Shankar Aiyar, during a book release event here on Saturday, wondered whether the April 22 terror attack in the verdant tourist spot of Baisaran that left 26 dead, was a result of "unresolved questions of the Partition."
The BJP saw this as the latest in a string of reprehensible and disparaging comments by Congress leaders and their kin.
There was no immediate reaction from the Congress to the BJP's hard-hitting remarks.
Reacting sharply to Aiyar's comments, BJP national spokesperson Pradeep Bhandari, in a post on X, said, "Good Cop, Bad Cop -- Congress's appeasement continues even on the Pahalgam Terror Attack!"
"After Robert Vadra and Siddaramaih, now Mani Shankar Aiyar refuses to blame Pakistan and the terrorists!" he said, adding, "Nothing has changed in Congress since 26/11 still shielding terror ecosystem, still showing love for Pakistan.
Siddaramaiah's
The BJP was sharp in its
The most recent was Aiyar's remark that the question posed to the country earlier and faced today was whether Muslims in India felt accepted, cherished and celebrated.
"Many people almost prevented Partition, but it happened because there were differences in value systems and assessments of the nature of India's nationhood and its civilisational inheritance between people like Gandhi, Pandit Nehru, Jinnah and many other Muslims who did not agree with Mr Jinnah.
"But the fact is that the Partition happened and till today we are living with the consequences of that Partition. Is this how we should be living? Is that the unresolved questions of the Partition reflected in the terrible tragedy ... in Pahalgam on April 22," he had said while condemning the attack.
Bhandari visited Haryana on Friday and met the family of Lt Vinay Narwal.
The photo of the navy officer's body lying on the ground in the lush Baisaran meadows of Pahalgam with his newlywed wife slumped beside it with an empty gaze has become the haunting symbol of the ghastly attack.
After meeting the family, the BJP spokesperson said that Pakistan would have to pay dearly for the loss of innocent lives in the attack.
"I visited the family of martyr Lt Vinay Narwal -- a braveheart who was killed by Pakistan-sponsored terrorists in Pahalgam. No words can ease the pain of his wife Himanshi Narwal and his grieving family, but let it be known: India will not forgive!" he said in a post on X.
"Pakistan will pay for every drop of tear, every drop of blood, every innocent life lost as
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Historian Srinath Raghavan on the build-up to the Emergency, its transformative impact on Indian polity and the lessons that we should learn. The session was moderated by Chief of Political Bureau Manoj CG. Manoj CG: Fifty years ago, India had its first brush with authoritarian rule, what we call the Emergency. Looking at the long arc of Mrs Indira Gandhi's years as Prime Minister then, how do you see her shadow in 2025, be it on politics, her party – the Congress – institutions, nation and the concept of leadership? I wanted to situate her long stints in power and out of power from 1966 until her assassination. And the idea of doing that was to get away from the Emergency itself, which tends to be the focal point of discussions. Important things happened both before and after the Emergency, which I think left a longer imprint. When we say that Indira Gandhi did something, we tend to think of it as something done intentionally. As a historian, I think it's also useful to remember the consequences of what her actions were rather than simply the intentions behind them. It's important to understand what she accomplished. Three things have cast a long shadow on politics, democracy and our political economy. First, we went from a period of more or less one-party dominant rule under the Congress to one where the Congress became a dominant player, but in a much more competitive environment. The competitiveness of Indian democracy that we see from the fourth general elections — 1967 onwards — is a very important feature. That very competitiveness led to a disregard of rules, norms and procedures, which are as important as elections in structuring democracy. The Emergency is the most extreme and shocking example of that kind of disregard for the rules of electoral democracy. The second aspect is strengthening of the executive vis-a-vis the legislature and the judiciary. The Janata government did attempt to undo some of it but still the overall institutional balance of power remains tilted towards the executive. This is true even of coalition governments. Mrs Gandhi had an ability to make charismatic, Caesarist appeals directly to the electorate. So the function and role of the party system itself underwent a very significant change in her time. The party was no longer the instrument which aggregated people's preferences and revealed them during the elections. Rather, it supported the political appeal of the leader. A similar model of leadership, where the charisma of an older patriarch follows on to the next generation, is seen not only in national politics but also state politics. The third impact was on political economy. There was a somewhat unwilling and unwitting move towards liberalisation of the economy, which actually started from about 1975, even before the Emergency. That process was important because it put India on this long road towards liberalisation. Though I wouldn't give much credit to her on that. She left her own impression on the welfare economy instead. We saw targetted schemes aimed at particular groups because they came under certain thresholds. The poverty line, for instance, became the longest and the most important imprint. And it continues. Manoj CG: Do you think her decision to choose Sanjay Gandhi first, and the Congress party's decision to bring in Rajiv Gandhi after her killing, laid the template of dynastic politics in India? The Congress party that elected Indira Gandhi as Prime Minister in 1966 was a very different kind of an entity from what it became during her time. She, of course, broke that party quite consciously in 1969. But what she found much more difficult through the 1970s was the ability to reorganise the party in ways that could actually strengthen its machinery. So the move towards relying on her son, first, the younger one, Sanjay Gandhi and subsequently Rajiv Gandhi, comes out as a result of her inability really to institutionalise the party. Manoj CG: Do you think the Congress needs to break from Mrs Gandhi's legacy going forward? There is very little that we see by way of an alternative leadership. And even if we do, like Sharad Pawar or Mamata Banerjee, they walk out. No ambitious politician has a significant pathway to the party's top leadership, given the kind of a family holding structure that this party has come to acquire. It started under Mrs Gandhi and has now just gone on for so long that it is very difficult, even for Congressmen themselves, to conceive of an alternative. That will require a break with this model, which, I think, is both cognitively and practically quite difficult for most people in this party to conceive of and execute. On leader over party | Mrs Gandhi had an ability to make charismatic, Caesarist appeals directly to the electorate. So the function and role of the party system itself underwent a very significant change in her time What should be the legacy of Indira Gandhi that the Congress party should carry? What was both a source of her strength and weaknesses was that she was a very bold and tenacious leader. Splitting the Congress party, a party of the nationalist movement, in 1969 was a dramatic move. She did it again post-Emergency though the party was already truncated at that time. But during the 1971 Bangladesh war, she was initially hesitant, tentative, she assessed. But when she felt the time was ripe for a decisive move, she was willing to make it and even break taboos. For instance, the peace and friendship treaty with the then Soviet Union in August 1971 was a decisive move against non-alignment, a key aspect of the party's foreign policy orientation. If the Congress party could recover a fraction of her chutzpah and the willingness to gamble and try new things that she demonstrated, perhaps it would have been stronger. But for that, fundamental structural issues have to be addressed. Manoj CG: Was the Emergency a natural culmination of her authoritarian streak? We tend to focus on why Indira Gandhi did the Emergency. But an equally important question is, how was it possible for an Emergency to be declared? After all, you have a political system. It has all kinds of checks and balances supposedly. There are various institutions in play, there are various political forces at hand. Despite all of this, how was it possible for an authoritarian rule to be imposed? The parliamentary party has always a certain kind of a check on the executive. But Mrs Gandhi, by her willingness to break the party and then subsequently those spectacular electoral victories that she won, practically became the entire party. It was beholden to her rather than she in any way being controlled by it. The second thing was the strengthening of the executive vis-a-vis Parliament and then the judiciary. The supersession of judges in 1973 was a very important moment. So the institutional balance of power was already secreted to the executive by June 12, 1975. After the Allahabad High Court ruling of June 12, 1975, (which found Mrs Gandhi guilty of electoral malpractices and barred her from holding elected office for six years) Jayaprakash Narayan demanded that the Prime Minister should step down in response to a popular demand, even though the Supreme Court said that she had a conditional stay, that she could stay on in power. Indira Gandhi paid them in the same coin. By that time, all the institutional rules of the game were considerably weakened. Without that, it is actually difficult to imagine how the Emergency could have been imposed. Vikas Pathak: Did Indira Gandhi bring in a new normal where the leader was seen as strong enough to deliver what institutions, which are a maze of procedures, could not? Has that stuck to Indian democracy? That's a very accurate assessment. Soon after the imposition of the Emergency, she announced a 20-point programme for various kinds of economic development and social policies. While some things done during the Emergency, for instance, have not been attempted subsequently, the underlying template that you need a strong leader to deliver specific things for specific segments of Indian society remains. Vikas Pathak: Why did she decide to revoke the Emergency? From June 1976 onwards, various assessments were being prepared for the Prime Minister on the progress of the Emergency. Initially, there was a sense that the government was decisive about moving against labour unions. There was a move towards redistribution of land for Dalits and other groups. When she realised the diminishing returns of continuing with this regime, the unfavourable aspects of population control policies and sterilisation, and that it would be better to move towards elections, she withdrew. To Indira Gandhi, the Emergency was only an interlude. On Congress | If the Congress party could recover a fraction of her chutzpah and the kind of willingness to gamble and try new things that she demonstrated, perhaps it would have been stronger Ritika Chopra: What convinced you that the Emergency story was worth retelling? What archival discoveries surprised you? The reason I wanted to write this book was because of the new archival material that I came across while researching for another book on the creation of Bangladesh. I came across private papers of Mrs Gandhi's principal secretary PN Haksar and other people close to her. The Janata Party's own papers, which are available in Teen Murti, allowed me to look at her from her opponents' lens. So I wanted to situate her within the broader historical context of her times and how those contexts were changing quite dramatically. The period between the late 60s and the mid-80s was a period of turbulence across the world. If you look at the 1970s, democratic governments everywhere were on the rope. India is only an extreme example of what happened. Part of the reason for that was the global economic and energy crisis of that period. So I wanted this broad picture within which to situate her actions. Harish Damodaran: What was the difference between Indira Gandhi of the 60s (rupee devaluation), the 70s (bank nationalisation and welfare schemes) and the 80s (when she secured a $5.8 billion IMF loan despite US opposition)? The rupee devaluation attracted strong political opposition, including from her own party. Bank nationalisation is perhaps the single most important economic decision taken in independent India. One of the things we learnt from documents now available in the Prime Minister's Secretariat is that it's only after the banks were nationalised that she actually started asking people what to do with the machinery. A new fiscal monitoring machine was created. Similarly, we tend to think of the 1970s as this high period of the socialist face of Indira Gandhi's economic policymaking. I feel, however, that the socialist face was actually already at an end by 1974 or thereabouts just as global inflation and its effects were kicking in. Through the Emergency, what you see is a slow attempt at taking away various kinds of controls. What scholars talk about as a pro-business kind of a tilt in the 1980s is already in evidence from the mid-1970s. She took an IMF loan in 1980 but she also took one in 1974, which is why I think 1974 is the breaking point. If you look at the conditions of the 1974 IMF loan, there is a very strong anti-inflation package, including wage freezes. In fact, the 1980 loan offer is built on that model and came with a homegrown conditionality. This suggested that instead of the World Bank and financial institutions imposing conditions on India, we ourselves would roll out measures to address their concerns. Aakash Joshi: Did Mrs Gandhi's leadership destroy the Congress' institutional mechanism and internal democracy? Much of the illiberal tendencies in subsequent governments, be it on federalism, preventive detention or role of governors, are traced back to Mrs Gandhi. What's your assessment? Where Indira Gandhi failed entirely was that having broken the party, she could never find other means of reconstituting it. She tried various things. The Youth Congress was from time to time trumped up as this great solution to the problem of institutionalisation. Again, to give credit to the Youth Congress and even perhaps to Sanjay Gandhi, they did bring in a new set of leaders. Nevertheless, that was not an answer for having new institutional structures. I do not believe the Congress of the old variant could have continued on course either. Something would have changed irrespective of whether she came on or somebody else did. Also illiberal tendencies did not begin with Mrs Gandhi. Preventive detention has been a feature of statute books for pretty much the time that the Indian Constitution has existed. The Constitution itself actually provides for preventive detention, funnily enough, in those parts which talk about fundamental rights. But what changed under her was the kind of preventive detention laws that she brought about, like the Internal Security Act of 1975. The Janata government repealed the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA) but brought in a new preventive detention law. On what enabled Emergency to happen | there is a much more collective responsibility that the entire Indian political elite of the time had. without that kind of collective abdication of the rules of the game, you would not have had a system which collapsed this way Similarly with the governors, I think no other Prime Minister or no government has used Article 356 (which mandates President's Rule) as much as Indira Gandhi did. That led to, especially in her final term, the whole Centre versus State kind of dynamic. Yes, she aggravated and accentuated many of the worst features of our legal political system but everything cannot be assumed to have originated from her. Rinku Ghosh: The Emergency has set a template that non-Congress parties now use to justify their actions in a tussle of whataboutery. What does this portend for future governments? What kind of lessons should we learn from this particular episode in our history? I say this fully conscious of the fact that history itself does not offer any lessons. It's only historians like me who tell what the lessons of history are, which is why we constantly disagree with each other. Rather we must ask , what was it that enabled the Emergency to happen? And when we ask ourselves that question, we understand that there is a much more collective responsibility that the entire Indian political elite of the time had for this disastrous turn that Indian politics took in 1975. Because without that kind of collective abdication of the rules of the game, in some ways, you would not have had a system which collapsed this way. If we believe that the rules of the game are of no consequence, then we are setting ourselves up for graver and more serious disasters. Deeptiman Tiwary: What actually hit Mrs Gandhi's popularity really badly, making her lose from her pocketborough in the elections that followed the Emergency, was forced sterilisation. Do you think the move that allowed the government to actually enter people's homes was a body blow? I don't think so. If you had a normal situation where fundamental rights were enforceable by courts, you could be pretty sure that people would immediately go to the courts and would have at least got a stay on some of what the government was trying to do. But the coercive drive was possible precisely because of the broader framework of authoritarianism within which the Emergency was happening. So I think that the coercive aspects of the sterilisation drive are only one dimension of the broader authoritarian turn that Indian politics had taken during this particular period.
