Tharoor slams Emergency as 'dark chapter', Cong hits back

In a veiled swipe at Congress MP Shashi Tharoor after he penned an article on the Emergency, party leader Manickam Tagore on Thursday said when a colleague starts repeating BJP lines word for word, one begins to wonder whether "the bird is becoming a parrot".

- Press Trust of India

Tharoor has said that the Emergency should not be remembered merely as a "dark chapter" in India's history, but that its lessons must be fully understood.

In an article on the Emergency published in the Malayalam daily Deepika on Thursday, the Congress Working Committee (CWC) member recalled the dark era of the Emergency declared by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi between June 25, 1975 and March 21, 1977, and said that efforts undertaken for discipline and order often turned into acts of cruelty that could not be justified.

Without naming anyone, Tagore, who is a Congress MP from Virudhunagar in Tamil Nadu and the party's whip in the Lok Sabha, said on X, "When a Colleague starts repeating BJP lines word for word, you begin to wonder — is the Bird becoming a parrot? Mimicry is cute in birds, not in politics." In his article, Tharoor said, "Sanjay Gandhi, the son of Indira Gandhi, led forced sterilisation campaigns which became a notorious example of this. In poor rural areas, violence and coercion were used to meet arbitrary targets."