The Bharatiya Janata Party has criticised Sonia Gandhi's memoir after she wrote of crying as she watched the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on television on 6 December 1992. BJP spokesperson C R Kesavan made the attack on X, questioning whether the Congress president had voiced similar grief over other episodes of violence in India.
The memoir, titled Belonging: A Journey of Love and published by HarperCollins, reached bookshops on Tuesday, with a stated release date of 10 November. In it, Gandhi says the demolition convinced her that secularism required a prolonged political struggle. In an accompanying interview she also acknowledged that complacency within the Congress had helped the BJP's rise, and described the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi as a mistake.
Kesavan argued that the book whitewashes the record of the Nehru-Gandhi family and the Congress party. He asked why Gandhi had not expressed comparable anguish over the anti-Sikh violence of 1984, over security personnel killed in the line of duty, or over the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Critics have said she has not previously spoken of such grief over other tragedies, although they have not offered supporting evidence for that claim.
Sudhanshu Trivedi, a Rajya Sabha member from the BJP, said the Congress had moved from what he called Ram Rajya to « Babar Raj », a partisan allegation rather than a stated Congress position. He also questioned which television channel had aired the demolition footage Gandhi described, a detail her interview did not specify. Trivedi further raised the 2008 Batla House encounter in Delhi and her comments on Gaza, and asked her to account for them in the same breath as her memoir's reflections on 1992.
Pradeep Bhandari accused Gandhi of seeking to rehabilitate Indira Gandhi's Emergency, a charge that turns on the interview in which she called the period a mistake rather than on the memoir's account of Ayodhya. Tarun Chugh, for his part, questioned how the memoir handles earlier Congress controversies, placing the Ayodhya passages within a wider argument about what the party has chosen to remember and what it has left out.
The demolition is a long-standing point of contention in Indian politics. The Supreme Court in 2019 allotted the disputed land for a Ram temple and directed that an alternative five-acre plot be given for a mosque, while describing the demolition of the mosque as a violation of the rule of law. The mosque was demolished by Hindu activists linked to the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. The exchange over Gandhi's remarks thus revives a dispute that the courts have already addressed, now framed by both sides in terms of the Congress's past and the BJP's present.
Source: ipanewspack.com
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