TADA was legislated by Rajiv Gandhi regime, Jaitley reminds Congress

"The distinction between an anti-terrorism and an anti-minority law is significant. The Congress and its allies tried to obliterate that difference. Since then the Congress started going soft on terror. It started an appeasement of terror," he said amid big row sparked off by Congress president Rahul Gandhi's remarks on Monday wherein he referred Jaish-e-Mohammad chief as 'Masood Azhar ji'.

"TADA was legislated when late Rajiv Gandhi was in power. It was used and abused but it continued as a law. After the 1993 Mumbai bomb blast it was widely used against the terrorists, a communal campaign started against this. TADA was dubbed as anti-minority," Jaitley wrote in a blog.

In this context, he said: "A campaign for its revocation started."

"The Narasimha Rao-led Congress Government repealed TADA. India, which was most adversely impacted by terror was without an anti-terror law which would act as a strong deterrent and contained both procedural and substitutional provisions to deal with crime relating to terror," he said.

Jaitley added the government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee legislated the Prevention of Terrorism Act, 2002 (POTA).

"It took the (NDA) Government a joint session of both Houses of Parliament to approve the law," Jaitley said adding the Congress promised to repeal the POTA.

On the issue of Congress going soft on terror, Jaitley also referred to the Batla House encounter of 2008 and the terrorists were killed.

"......the Congress leaders dubbed it as a fake encounter. The terrorists they claimed were innocent. When the guilty of the 1993 Mumbai bomb blast, 26/11 attack on India’s commercial capital and the Parliament attack case were to be executed, many Congressmen started appealing for amnesty." he said.

The ‘disruptionists’ who prefer to call themselves ‘Left liberals’, fought a legal battle to save the terrorists, Jaitley said.