At an evening adda today, a harmless and nearly non-committal comment of mine became the launch pad for a debate that raged over an hour and engulfed a couple of passerby’s into it. I reached the adda and the two persons already present there remarked about how the recent elections in the state assemblies went against the BJP. Beginning with the qualifier: “I am not a supporter of BJP myself,” I added that even if the voters chose to go en masse against the incumbent government, they simply couldn’t vote for a diseased and int/fernally weak Congress. My remark was strongly objected to and they asked me to either prove my point (or, as their eyes spoke, apologize). As I was in no mood to apologize, I simply went on to prove what I thought was obvious. I told them about the traditional and consistent hero-worship of post-independence Congress. I also reminded them of the serious charges of corruption and more leveled against the Congress Prime Ministers Mrs. Indira Gandhi and Mr. Rajiv Gandhi, and of the reports of property of Mr. Gandhi and Mrs. Sonia Gandhi stashed in foreign accounts. I added to that the much publicized and known ineptness of (or, as they’d prefer it to be put, plain bad luck of) Mr. Rahul Gandhi. I was exulting and congratulating myself by the end of my part of the speech, as I was sure I had proven my case. Alas, how wrong I was!
My friends demanded for concrete evidence for the Gandhis’s black money stashed in foreign accounts. As I was not prepared with exact names and sources, I requested them to give me one day for research. Then they began with their praise of Mrs. Indira Gandhi. I countered them with the magical and self-explanatory points: the 1984 Sikh Massacre, Operation Blue Star, 1975, the Emergency and Allahabad High Court’s verdict on Mrs. Gandhi’s use of unfair means in election. I even mentioned the Nellie Massacre and Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s response to it to make my case strong. Their response to it was similar to that of Mrs. Gandhi’s response to Nellie (“One has to let such events take their course before stepping in,” <https://scroll.in/article/829682/why-was-assams-nellie-massacre-of-1983-not-prevented-despite-intimations-of-violence>) and to Mr. Gandhi’s response to October-November 1984. They said that the Congress ought to be praised for containing the possible damage by limiting the number of casualties at around three thousand only. They said that when a leader like Mrs. Gandhi is assassinated, the expected spontaneous public reaction is what was observed in 1984. When I countered that with the proven role of Congress leaders in the massacre, and with the recorded eye-witness accounts naming Mr. Sajjan Kumar, Mr Jagdish Tytler, and Mr. Kamal Nath along with other notable Congress party members as the leaders of blood-thirsty hound packs, they simply glided over it with the claim that Mr. Rajiv Gandhi had nothing to do with it. I reminded them of his (in) famous “Once a mighty tree falls, it is only natural that the earth around it shakes” speech, and they completely agreed with the sentiments expressed there. I told them that out of the three days of massacre in Delhi, Mr. Gandhi was at the helm for two and had the moral responsibility to stop it. My friends would not listen to anything like that. I then lamented that they did not even properly accept the responsibility of their family (dynasty) in whatever happened till date, neither did they fully and formally apologized to the Sikh community. Mrs. Gandhi did that in an oblique manner <http://m.rediff.com/news/1998/jan/27sorry.htm> and her son once reused to do so <https://www.indiatoday.in/india/north/story/rahul-gandhi-interview-modi-gujarat-behind-2002-riots-congress-tried-to-stop-killing-in-1984-riots-178614-2014-01-27> and then did it half-heartedly and for damage control later <https://indianexpress.com/article/india/politics/i-share-pm-sonia-gandhis-apology-over-1984-riots-rahul-gandhi/> To that the rejoinder was that Mr. Rajiv Gandhi had done that way back in 1985 in the Longowal Accord. I searched for the text of the accord and discovered that there was no mention of Mr. Gandhi apologizing there <http://www.sikhtimes.com/doc_072485a.html>.
About the charge of corruption against the three senior Gandhis, I reached the archived page of Swiss Magazine Schweizer Illustriertein from 1991 and found Mr. Gandhi in the list, along with Idi Amin, Saddam Hussaien, Suharto and Abu Nidal. Although with his 2.5 billion Swiss Francs he is definitely at the end of the list and is an angel when compared to the God of Corrupt Politicians of the time, Mr. Amin with over 500 times that amount. Such a charge went unchallenged and the powerful members of the Gandhi clan chose not to sue the magazine, may be taken as a weak indicator of its veracity. Although it must be admitted that a magazine’s article is no conclusive evidence. The same is true about Mrs. Sonia Gandhi’s net worth, not as she declared in India, but as was put in the Huffington Post, coming from < https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-politicians/presidents/sonia-gandhi-net-worth/ >. Even that does not prove the charge conclusively. So, I humbly take back the old charges of corruption from the public sphere of my discourse, although my stubborn memory refuses to erase it and my mind has long accepted the charges as true in the private sphere.
My claim of corruption (if electoral malpractice and misuse of power are covered loosely by the term) against Mrs. Indira Gandhi was undeniable <https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/the-court-verdict-that-prompted-indira-gandhi-to-declare-emergency/story-uaDsy0j3B0vSdiPn2md9WO.html>, so my friends called Justice Jagmohan Lal Sinha, the man many Indians and I respect for his integrity and courage, a RSS-BJP sympathizer. Thus they questioned the integrity of that individual and also of the whole Indian Judiciary. That person has passed away, and I feel honour-bound to linger here a little to make a point supporting him. A former Law Minister and his personal acquaintance spoke in glowing terms about Justice Sinha:
“Justice Sinha was a very able honest and God fearing judge. Before the judgment an attempt was made to influence him by the then Chief Justice of Allahabad High Court D S Mathur who visited him at his residence along with his wife for the first and only one time to convey to him that he had been informed by Dr Mathur who was related to him and was the personal physician of Mrs Gandhi that she had decided to elevate Justice Sinha to the Supreme Court after he had decided the case. However Justice Sinha’s strong conscience did not permit him to take the bait. This was conveyed to me long after the judgment by Justice Sinha himself when we both were playing golf in Allahabad… His judgment was unassailable and Mrs Gandhi had to change the law retrospectively to get over his judgment. His judgment was hailed all over the democratic world as a great triumph of an independent judiciary in India” (Quoted in https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/the-court-verdict-that-prompted-indira-gandhi-to-declare-emergency/story-uaDsy0j3B0vSdiPn2md9WO.html).
‘He also declined the offer Shanti Bhushan made, as Law Minister in 1977, to transfer him to the Himachal Pradesh High Court “so that he could get elevated as Chief Justice when a vacancy arose”. ‘ (https://frontline.thehindu.com/static/html/fl2508/stories/20080425250808200.htm)
rajnishmishravns 