Chandigarh, Nov 11 — Punjab Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President Kewal Singh Dhillon on Wednesday challenged claims made by Congress leader Sonia Gandhi's in her memoir, 'Belonging: A Journey of Love', concerning the former Prime Minister late Indira Gandhi and the June 1984 Operation Blue Star.
He terming it a calculated political ploy to whitewash the sins of the Gandhi family and the Congress party after 42 years.
Dhillon said Sonia Gandhi's claim that Indira Gandhi had "tears of pain and remorse" in her eyes after watching footage of Operation Blue Star rubs salt into the wounds of the Sikh community.
"If there was genuine remorse, why was the truth suppressed for decades?"
He added that while Sonia Gandhi conceded that factional infighting within the Punjab Congress worsened the situation, she conveniently rationalised the military assault as an "unavoidable necessity" to absolve the family and the party.
He stressed that deploying tanks and artillery against Sri Harmandir Sahib and Sri Akal Takht Sahib, followed by the state-sponsored massacre of Sikhs in November 1984, cannot be brushed aside as merely a "regrettable chapter" to escape historical accountability.
Hitting out at the Congress' 'Punjab Mangda Insaaf' campaign and its cycle-borne 'Insaaf Yatra', Dhillon said a party stained with the blood of thousands of innocent Sikhs in 1984 has no moral right to speak of "justice" in Punjab.
He asked: "What does an 'Insaaf Yatra' mean in Punjab without full justice for the 1984 victims and a public, unconditional apology from Congress for its heinous crimes?"
Dhillon highlighted that for decades, successive Congress governments protected the guilty and handed out clean chits.
It was only after the Narendra Modi government took office in 2014 and constituted a dedicated Special Investigation Team (SIT) that justice finally caught up with the perpetrators, leading to life imprisonment for Sajjan Kumar and the framing of charges against Jagdish Tytler.
The State BJP Chief demanded that rather than staging theatrics through memoirs and yatras, the Gandhi family and the Congress leadership must tender an unconditional, public apology to Punjab and the Sikh panth, while owning full responsibility for sabotaging justice for more than four decades.