On 'Regime Change', Shashi Tharoor Fires An 'Emergency' Retort

Congress MP Shashi Tharoor on Friday cited the Emergency period of 1975-77 to counter the BJP's charge that the current wave of protests over alleged electoral fraud is anti-national or funded by entities in the West to effect "regime change".

"[PM Narendra] Modi does keep talking about the Emergency and how the Emergency was overthrown. How was it overthrown? Through an Opposition, where the RSS and the BJP were merging with socialists and leftists. They all united in order to defeat the government that had declared the Emergency. That's recent Indian political history, just half a century ago," Tharoor said, speaking of the defeat of the Indira Gandhi-led Congress regime by a unified Janata Party.

In an interactive session at the NDTV World Summit in New Delhi, the former minister shot down the argument that violent protests such as those currently on in France could happen in India. "I think the line is very clearly drawn by our Constitution, by our laws. It is that peaceful protest is the democratic right of every Indian citizen; violence is not," he said.

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"What we've seen happening in France is not something that anybody in India's political space would condone. I don't, and I don't think my party in any way would welcome [violence]," he asserted.

On the idea of "regime change" as mentioned by current protest leaders such as AISA president Neha Bora and lawyer-activist Prashant Bhushan in some contexts such as Bangladesh, Shashi Tharoor said, "We (the Congress) believe in peaceful, organised, and disciplined protest. At the same time, we expect that if we can actually find the government, and the Election Commission as well, willing to be accountable for the deep irregularities [in] through the SIR (Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls) process in the last couple of years, then we believe there will once again be a clean system. The electoral rules will be restored, no Indian citizen will be deprived of their constitutional right to cast their vote and determine their own political choices, and in a free and fair election there will not be 'regime change'; there will be government change. The Indian public has seen the inadequacies of the present government, but we want to bring that [change] about through free and fair elections."

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On how the Congress could align with the Left, AISA being one of them, while fighting each other in Tharoor's home state Kerala and other places, the diplomat-turned-politician spoke of AISA chief Neha Bora to make a point.

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"These parties have their value, but Neha Bora wasn't campaigning against us. I like her; she's brought a lot of energy, colour, and life into the protest, the movement. It's about the Congress party being a moderate party and about acceptance. It's Opposition unity," he said.

That's when he mentioned the Emergency, after which Indira Gandhi lost the 1977 elections to a Janata Party formed by Congress dissidents, the BJP's predecessor Jana Sangh, socialists and Left groups. That later came apart, and Indira Gandhi returned to power in 1980.