The ruling BJP and Opposition Congress continued to engage in a political slugfest over the imposition of Emergency in the country five decades ago by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.  Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday said those who imposed the Emergency have no right to profess love for the Constitution.

“The mindset which led to the imposition of the Emergency is very much alive among the same party which imposed it. They hide their disdain for the Constitution through their tokenism but the people of India have seen through their antics and that is why they have rejected them time and again,” Modi said on social media platforms.

Countering the PM, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge on his part said Modi keeps scratching the past to hide his failures. “In the last 10 years, you made 140 crore Indians realise what ‘undeclared emergency’ is, which caused a deep trauma to democracy and the Constitution,” Kharge said.

Home Minister Amit Shah came out strongly against the grand old party and said the opposition party crushed the spirit of the Constitution several times for the sake of “maintaining a certain family in power”.

On the 49th anniversary of the 1975 Emergency, Shah also hit out at Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, calling him the “yuvraj” of the party and saying it has forgotten that his grandmother Indira Gandhi had imposed the Emergency and his father and successor of Indira, Rajiv Gandhi said in Parliament on July 23, 1985, that “there is nothing wrong with an emergency”.

While Congress hit back at Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his comments on the Emergency, and accused him of enforcing an “undeclared emergency” in the last 10 years. Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge said the prime minister is raking up the past only to hide his failures. He also said that PM Modi talks of consensus and cooperation but does just the opposite.

“Mr. Rajiv Gandhi even said, ‘If any Prime Minister of this country who feels that an Emergency is necessary, under these circumstances and does not apply the Emergency, he is not fit to be the Prime Minister of this country’. This very act of taking pride in a dictatorial act shows that nothing else is dear to the Congress other than the family and power,” Amit Shah wrote on social media and shared some news clippings of those days.

Censorship was imposed on the media, the Constitution was amended and even the judiciary was restrained, Shah said, paying tributes to those who waged a fight against the Emergency.

His party the BJP also launched a sharp attack on the Congress, with its president J P Nadda saying that those who claim to be the guardians of Indian democracy today had spared no efforts to suppress the voices raised in the defence of constitutional values.