JOIN USRaje's damaging 'Emergency' revelation
This “Emergency” revelation is unlikely to be music to the Congress ears.
Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje in her 2011 confidential statement supporting disgraced former IPL commissioner Lalit Modi’s immigration application ended up letting out a family secret that will hurt her brother the Late Madhavrao Scindia’s illustrious lineage.
The Congress on Thursday latched on to BJP patriarch L K Advani’s fear expressed in a published interview that “Emergency (era between 1975-77) can return as forces that can crush democracy are stronger”.
The Opposition party said Advani’s emergency remarks were directed at Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Referring to her royal family background, Raje wrote that former Union minister Madhavrao Scindia, who won his first Lok Sabha polls from Guna in 1971 as an independent but with Bharatiya Jan Sangh support, and his family “switched allegiances” to the Congress which had “concentration of power” post Emergency.
“My older brother, the late Madhavrao Scindia, was also a prominent Indian politician. He was a member of the Lok Sabha for nine terms, having never lost an election from 1971 when he was first elected. He was initially an independent candidate who was elected with the support of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh. Following the imposition of a national Emergency resulting in the concentration of power into the hands of the ruling Congress party, my brother along with his immediate family switched allegiances to the Congress party, despite opposition from within our extended family,” the fifth paragraph of her three-page statement read.
But for this controversial portion of her extended family recall, Raje’s statement merely sketched brief profiles of her father Gwalior Maharaja George Jivajirao, mother Vijayaraje and other siblings.
After Madhavrao’s death in a 2001 air crash, his son Jyotiraditya Scindia took up active politics and became an MP a year later from the family’s pocket borough in Madhya Pradesh.
He became a minister in the UPA-II regime and returned to the Lok Sabha despite the Congress losing out to the “Modi wave” in the last 2014 elections.
Raje is believed to have talked about herself and the royal Gwalior family to lend gravitas to her statement which she did not want Indian authorities to know.
Madhavrao’s differences with his mother Vijayaraje Scindia at the time of imposition of the Emergency by former prime minister Indira Gandhi has been chronicled by Vijayaraje’s close associate Sardar Angre.
Madhavrao escaped to Nepal to hide at his sister Usha Raje’s home, despite his mother Vijayaraje, who was one of the founder members of the BJP which emerged from the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, wanting him to face the crackdown during the Emergency.
After the Emergency was lifted, Madhavrao returned to India and joined the Congress and since then the family became very close to the Gandhi family.