Union Minister Arun Jaitley on Monday compared former prime minister Indira Gandhi to Adolf Hitler for having imposed Emergency in the country 43 years ago.

Jaitley’s thoughts, penned on Facebook and titled The Tyranny of Emergency , is part of a series of articles to commemorating the proclamation of Emergency on the intervening night of June 25-26, 1975.

While describing his own experiences as a political detainee during Emergency, Jaitley, who is convalescing after a surgery, said the “script” for authoritarian rule was planned in advance, and wondered if it had been “inspired by what happened in Nazi Germany in 1933”.

“Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. He did not have an absolute majority in Parliament. On February 28, he got his President to invoke Article 48 of the Constitution which gave [him] emergency powers for the ‘protection of the people in the State’…The pretext for imposition of Emergency was that on February 27, [the] German Parliament House, known as “Reichstag”, had been set on fire. Hitler claimed that it was a communist conspiracy to burn government buildings and museums. Thirteen years later, in the Nuremberg trials, it was established that [the] Reichstag fire was the handiwork of Nazis and [Joseph] Goebbels (Hitler’s Propaganda Minister] had conceived it,” Jaitley wrote.

Jaitley said Indira Gandhi had “ imposed the Emergency under Article 352, suspended fundamental rights under Article 359”, claiming that the Opposition was planning ‘disorder... in the country’. The then prime minister had claimed that her actions were to transform the country into a ‘disciplined democracy’.

“Both Hitler and Mrs. Gandhi never abrogated the Constitution. They used a republican Constitution to transform democracy into dictatorship,” he added.

Like Hitler, said Jaitley, Indira Gandhi also arrested most Opposition MPs, thereby ensuring a two-third majority in Parliament, and pushing through “several obnoxious provisions through Constitution amendments”.

Jaitley asserted that Indira Gandhi had even surpassed Hitler in subverting democracy.

“There were a few things that Hitler did not do which Mrs. Gandhi did. She prohibited the publication of Parliamentary proceeding in the media. The law which gave [a] mandate to the media for publishing Parliamentary proceedings was popularly known as the Feroze Gandhi Bill because late Shri Feroze Gandhi had singularly campaigned for her after the Haridas Mundhra scandal, which was raised by him in Parliament. Since Hitler’s own election has been set aside, he had no change to make in this regard. Mrs. Gandhi amended both the Constitution and the Representation of People Act,” said Jaitley.

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