Congress president Rahul Gandhi took to Twitter on Sunday to thank Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak after meeting him a day earlier, but it is his comments on his father’s killers that trended online.
In a video shared by the Congress’s Twitter handle in which Mr. Gandhi is seen interacting with Indian Institute of Management alumni in Singapore on March 9, he said his family had known that his grandmother Indira Gandhi and father Rajiv would be killed for having taken a stand.
“We knew that Papa [father] was going to die. We knew that Dadi [paternal grandmother] was going to die. My grandmother told me that she was going to die and my father ... I told him that he is going to die. In politics, when you mess with the wrong forces, and if you stand for something, you will die,” he said.
Asked if he and his sister Priyanka had been able to forgive his father’s killers, Mr. Gandhi said, “We were very upset and hurt, and for many years we were quite angry. But, somehow, [we have] completely ... in fact, completely [forgiven them].”
Elaborating on his answer, he said, “There is a history that when one realises that when these events take place, it’s a collision of ideas, forces, confusion. That’s where you get caught. I remember when I saw Mr. Prabhakaran [former Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam chief] on TV lying dead, I got two feelings — one was why they are humiliating this man in this way.”
“And second was that I felt really bad for him and for his kids and I did that because I understood deeply what it meant to be on the other side of that thing. So to me, when I see violence, regardless of who it is, I know that there is a human being behind that, there is a family behind that, a kid crying behind that,,” he said.
“I was 14 when my grandmother was assassinated. I used to play badminton with those who killed my grandmother. After that, my father was killed. So you live in a particular environment ... surrounded by 15 guys from morning, noon to night, I don’t think that’s a privilege. I think that is quite a hard thing to deal with.”
