Mrs Gandhi transformed India into dynastic democracy, says Jaitley
NEW DELHI: In a biting indictment of the Emergency that was imposed on June 25, 43 years ago, senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Arun Jaitley compared it with Adolf Hitler’s dictatorial regime in Germany. He also accused former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who took the decision to impose the Emergency, of transforming India into a “dynastic democracy”.
Drawing parallels between Emergency — it saw opposition leaders jailed, press freedom curbed, and forced sterilisation carried out—with the occurrences of what “happened in Nazi Germany in 1933”, Jaitley said: “Both Hitler and Mrs Gandhi never abrogated the Constitution. They used a republican Constitution to transform democracy into dictatorship.”
In the second part of his threepart blog on the Emergency , the Union minister said, Mrs Gandhi’s imposition of Emergency under Article 352, suspension of fundamental rights under Article 359 and her claim that “disorder was planned by the opposition in the country”, echoed Hitler’s “Reichstag” episode as exposed by the Nuremberg trials after 13 years. The BJP leader, who was among those jailed during the Emergency, wrote that just as Hitler arrested most of the opposition Members of Parliament and brought detailed Constitution amendments vesting all power in one person, Gandhi also arrested most opposition MPs and, procured, through their absence, a two-thirds majority of the house, and used it to pass several Constitution amendments.
“There were a few things that Hitler did not do which Mrs Gandhi did. She prohibited the publication of Parliamentary proceedings in the media… Unlike Hitler, Mrs Gandhi went ahead to transform India into a ‘dynastic Democracy’,” he wrote.
This is not the first time that political leaders have sought to draw comparisons between their opponents with Hitler.
In 2014, Congress President Rahul Gandhi while addressing farmers in Gujarat’s Balasinor had attacked Narendra Modi, the then PM candidate by comparing him with the Nazi leader.
Sanjay Kumar of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies disagreed with the comparison.
“There have been many parties and several leaders in power in the past such as VP Singh, IK Gujaral and Deve Gowda. We have seen when people want to vote out someone they do so notwithstanding the person’s political lineage. There are many examples of dynastic parties at the state levels also losing power,” he said. Congress leader Jairam Ramesh criticised the blog saying, “The comparison is odious and atrocious. He needs to be reminded about the early influence of Mussolini and Hitler on the RSS which has been extensively documented... In mid-January 1977 Indira Gandhi called for elections in which she was humbled ... But less than three years later the very same people brought her back to office with a resounding mandate.”