The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Tuesday (November 10, 2026) alleged that former Congress president Sonia Gandhi, through her book, attempted to shield former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and the Congress leadership from responsibility for the 1984 anti-Sikh massacre.
Vaidya. Phoolka. “Rajiv Gandhi was the country’s Prime Minister at the time. Union Minister Giriraj Singh accused Ms. Gandhi of being selective in expressing grief over incidents such as Babri and Batla House, but not over the Godhra and Pahalgam incidents.
“First, as per the Misra Commission’s report, 6,100 soldiers were available in Delhi on the night of October 31 and the morning of November 1, but they were not deployed in time. The Commission also wrote that if 5,000 of these soldiers had been made to march through Delhi’s streets on the morning of November 1, at least 2,000 Sikhs could have been saved. If he was not directly responsible himself, what action did he take against those who failed to mobilise the Army present in Delhi on the morning of November 1? He said her book should have addressed what he described as former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s mistakes, including Tibet and Articles 370 and 35A.
At a press briefing, senior BJP leader Harvinder Singh Phoolka said: “In the book that Sonia Gandhi has published, she has tried to give her family a clean chit over the massacre of Sikhs. He alleged that the book’s account, which was in “complete contradiction of the official record”, wrongly attributed the delay in deploying the Army to General A.S. Both the Misra Commission and the Nanavati Commission made the same point in their reports,” he said. “The Misra Commission says that even if Rajiv Gandhi had alerted General Vaidya, the Army Chief’s job is only to keep the Army ready, while administrative officials are responsible for calling in the Army and deploying it in the field. The administrative machinery neither called in the Army in time nor deployed it,” said Mr. Instead, at his first public rally, Rajiv Gandhi said: ‘When a big tree falls, the earth shakes a little. In this way, he tried to justify the entire massacre,” he said.
Chidambaram. He would sometimes stay back for conversations with Ms. Gandhi after meetings of the Congress Strategy Group, which was set up to discuss parliamentary business.
BJP spokesperson Pradeep Bhandari alleged that the book reflected the Congress’s “vote-bank politics”, which would lead to another electoral defeat for the principal Opposition party in 2029. Earlier reporting noted: Pranab Mukherjee hinted at desire to become PM, ‘shocked’ me, writes Sonia Gandhi Former President Pranab Mukherjee had “shocked” Sonia Gandhi by hinting at his “long-held desire” to become Prime Minister during a conversation with her in 2010, suggesting that perhaps it was time for a “change at the top”, the former Congress president has written in her memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love . Earlier reporting noted: “On one occasion, in 2010, I think after expressing his frustration, he shocked me with the suggestion that perhaps it was time for a change at the top, which I understood as a hint of his long-held desire to become Prime Minister,” she wrote.
Earlier reporting noted: Mukherjee, then a senior member of the Manmohan Singh Cabinet, had developed serious differences with the then Finance Minister P.
