NEW DELHI: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday said the imposition of Emergency by then late PM Indira Gandhi was a mistake but added that Congress had never tried to capture the institutions like, what he called, was happening now under BJP-RSS.
In an interaction with former chief economic advisor to GOI and Cornell university professor Kaushik Basu and students, Rahul Gandhi said Emergency was a “mistake” and “wrong”. “That was a mistake. My grandmother (Indira Gandhi) said as much,” he said.
But he said there was a fundamental difference between what happened during the Emergency and what was happening now. “Congress at no point attempted to capture India’s institutional framework,” he said, adding RSS is doing something “fundamentally different” by filling up the institutions of the country with its people.
According to Basu, former president Pranab Mukherjee told him just before his passing that Indira Gandhi was worried about losing polls but still called the election in 1977 because she wanted to “test” it.