Will Congress apologise for strangling Constitution during Emergency: BJP MP Prasad
Mumbai, June 25 (UNI) Senior BJP leader and former Union minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad, today recounted the atrocities committed during the Emergency in 1975, saying that the Congress had turned the entire country into a prison and tortured opposition activists during the period and sought to know will its leaders apologise for the same.
Addressing a press conference here organised to commemorate 50 years of the Emergency, he said that one-and-a-half lakh people were arrested across the country during the Emergency, including all the leaders of the major opposition parties like Jan Sangh and Samajwadi Party.
Among them was Loknayak Jayaprakash Narayan who was kept in jail in Haryana, he recalled and said that Morarji Desai was also kept in the same jail.
No one was allowed to meet the two leaders, he said.
RSS volunteers and Jana Sangh workers were physically tortured in jail, he alleged.
Prasad further alleged that the Constitution was strangled by making several amendments during the Emergency and wondered will Congress leaders apologise for turning the entire country into a prison and torturing opposition activists during the Emergency, and for forcibly performing sterilisation surgeries and atrocities on the common people.
He said that 253 journalists were arrested during the Emergency, out of them, 110 journalists were arrested under the MISA Act, 110 under the Protection of Information Act and 33 were arrested under other serious offences, he added.
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