Congress leadership 'very upset' over Chidambaram's Operation Bluestar remark

The Congress leadership is “very upset” with former Home Minister P Chidambaram for his remarks on ‘Operation Bluestar’, and is of the view that senior leaders should be careful before making public statements that create embarrassment for the party, party sources said on Sunday.

Chidambaram, while speaking at a literary event in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, on Saturday, said that Operation Bluestar was “wrong” and then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi “paid the price with her life for the mistake”.

Also read: 'Op Bluestar was a mistake, Indira Gandhi paid with her life': Chidambaram

Party sources said the Congress leadership is of the view that “senior leaders, who have got everything from the Congress party, should be more careful in making statements that create embarrassment for the party. And, this cannot become a habit”.

They said senior leaders should make public statements with care because their repeated statements create problems for the party which is not correct.

“The top party leadership is very upset and the entire party is very upset. The rank and file of the party are agitated about why this is happening repeatedly,” the sources said in the context of Chidambaram, who has, in the recent past too, made some remarks that have caused consternation to the party.

At the Khushwant Singh Literary Festival in Kasauli, Chidambaram said on Saturday that Operation Bluestar was a “wrong way” to take on the militants.

Chidambaram, a Rajya Sabha MP, while in conversation with journalist and author Harinder Baweja on her book ‘They Will Shoot You Madam: My Life Through Conflict’, said, “There was a way to retrieve and capture all militants but Operation Bluestar was a wrong way and I agree that Mrs Gandhi paid with her life for the mistake but the mistake was cumulative decision of the Army, intelligence, police and civil defence and you cannot completely blame on Mrs Gandhi”.

Operation Bluestar was a military operation undertaken between June 1 and June 10, 1984, against Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale-led armed militants who were holed up on the premises of the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards on October 31, 1984.

Earlier in a podcast, Chidambaram had suggested that he personally favoured military retribution against Pakistan following the ghastly 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, but the government led by then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh decided to go by the External Affairs Ministry’s view to resort to diplomatic measures against the neighbouring country.

He noted that world powers, including the US, wanted India not to start a war with Pakistan.

Chidambaram, who was the Union Home Minister then, said in the interview that the entire world had descended on New Delhi to stop it from taking any action against Pakistan in retaliation against the terror strike.

The senior Congress leader also said that the then US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, had asked him and then Prime Minister Manmohan “not to react”, he said.