Sonia Gandhi Calls 1975 Emergency a Mistake, Says Indira Gandhi Regretted It

Sonia Gandhi has called the 1975 Emergency a mistake and said she believes Indira Gandhi later came to feel the same. The Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson made the remarks in an interview with The Guardian ahead of the launch of her memoir Belonging: A Journey of Love.

The comments are significant because they revisit one of the most contested periods in India’s political history through the account of a senior Congress leader and family member.  

Her remarks also ranged beyond the Emergency. In the Guardian interview, she spoke about the demolition of Babri Masjid in December 1992, the rise of the BJP and what she described as failings within the Congress.

Memoir And Interview

The memoir makes a direct reference to Sanjay Gandhi’s role during that period. Sonia also wrote that “keeping Sanjay (Gandhi) in check could have prevented much of the damage that followed”.

She also recalled watching the demolition of Babri Masjid on television in December 1992. She cried as she saw it unfold, she told The Guardian, and felt then that India faced “a long battle for the secular nation that Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru and their colleagues had striven to build”.

That recollection ties her memoir to a wider political argument. It places the book not just in the Congress family’s history but also in Sonia’s account of how India’s secular project came under strain.

Congress And BJP

Sonia Gandhi also accepted that the Congress was partly responsible for the BJP’s rise. The Guardian reported that she said failures within her own party had in part contributed to the growth of the BJP and its Hindutva politics.

She was blunt about the party’s approach.

“I think we have been too complacent in many ways. There was a laissez-faire kind of an attitude,” she told The Guardian.

That assessment added a note of self-criticism to the interview linking the Congress’s decline, in her telling, to choices made within the party rather than only to the BJP’s expansion.

Emergency Reflections

Her sharpest comments were on the Emergency.

“I always feel that Mrs (Indira) Gandhi was a democrat at heart. I know that many would laugh at this, but I believe she was never comfortable during the course of the Emergency. I think it sat heavy on her,” Sonia Gandhi said in the interview.

She also said the family was divided over the decision. Rajiv Gandhi opposed the move and told his mother to wait for the next election, while Sanjay Gandhi pushed for the Emergency.

In an interview published on Saturday in The Hindu, Sonia Gandhi gave a broader account of the pressures around Indira Gandhi. “It was not only Sanjay, though in the public mind he is often seen as synonymous with the Emergency. There was a lot of pressure from some of her senior colleagues, and I think there were very few people around her like Rajiv who had a different point of view. I think eventually my mother-in-law began to understand the situation through her own wisdom and took actions to remedy it,” she said.

She also spoke about what she understood only later. “It was only after the Emergency that I came to know about the true gravity of what had been happening. Yes, democratic rights had been curtailed, and there was a suspension of habeas corpus, but it was done constitutionally,” Sonia Gandhi said in the interview.

She then described how her own view changed with time. “Yet, when I take myself back to that period and try and see it from Mrs Gandhi's point of view, I see her struggling to cope with the rapidly deteriorating prevailing circumstances...” Gandhi said. “Hindsight allows us to put things in perspective.” Sonia Gandhi also said Indira Gandhi later publicly expressed regret and apologised for excesses during the Emergency.