Sonia Gandhi Reveals Sanjay Gandhi's Role in India's 1975-77 Emergency Period

NEW DELHI: Describing Sanjay Gandhi as a "man in a hurry", Congress leader Sonia Gandhi says he had a "significant role" in decision-making during the Emergency despite lacking a constitutional locus standi for some of his political interventions. Deep down, then prime minister Indira Gandhi had never been entirely at ease with the Emergency but felt compelled by the "prevailing havoc of the time", Sonia Gandhi, who had an inside view of the goings-on during the June 1975 to March 1977 period, writes in her memoir Belonging: A Journey of Love . On the morning of June 26, 1975, India woke up to the Emergency. Over the course of the night, arrests had been made, and by morning most political opposition personalities and dissenters were imprisoned, the top leaders in government guest houses and others in different jails, Gandhi recalls. Habeas corpus had been suspended and protests and gatherings banned, she says. "The country found itself in a clampdown. Press censorship was imposed. Some newspapers fell in line immediately; a few resisted for a while," Gandhi says. In recounting the Emergency years, the former Congress president also speaks, perhaps for the first time, about her brother-in-law Sanjay who died in a plane crash in 1980 at the age of 33. "A great deal has been written, true and false, about the Emergency and Sanjay's part in the turbulent events of that time that he was concerned about losing Maruti, or that he feared for his political future. Whatever his faults may have been, Sanjay was no coward. He was in fact without fear to the point of being reckless, and -- as subsequent events showed -- he had enough courage in him to face any situation and to fight his way back to political leadership," she says. "What is undeniable, however, is that he had a significant role in decision-making during the Emergency period, despite lacking a constitutional locus standi for some of his political interventions," Gandhi says in her book.