‘Ready to take responsibility’: Rahul Gandhi on 1984 anti-Sikh riots

Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi has said that he is willing to “take responsibility for everything bad that the Congress has done in its history”, including the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.

Gandhi’s comments were made on April 21 in response to a question by a Sikh student at Brown University in the United States. The Congress leader was conversing with political scientist Ashutosh Varshney at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

The video of the discussion was uploaded on the institute’s YouTube channel on Saturday.

Large-scale riots broke out in Delhi on October 31, 1984, after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, who was the prime minister at the time, by her Sikh bodyguards. Mobs, allegedly helped by some Congress leaders, had attacked Sikhs and torched their homes. Nearly 3,000 Sikhs were killed in Delhi alone.

Asked by the student what he was doing to reconcile with the community, Gandhi said: “I don’t think that anything scares the Sikhs. The statement I made was that do we want an India where people are uncomfortable to express their religion?”

He added: “As far as mistakes of the Congress party are concerned, a lot of those mistakes happened when I was not there, but I am more than happy to take responsibility for everything that...

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