Those who imposed emergency talk about intoleance : Arun Jaitley launches counter offensive

During a special discussion on the Constitution in the Rajya Sabha, Jaitley also compared the 1975 Emergency imposed by the Indira Gandhi government to Hitler's Germany.

The  Finance Minister  gave a point-by-point rebuttal to comments by the Congress and other opposition parties in the Lok Sabha, where the discussion began on Thursday to mark the birth anniversary of BR Ambedkar, the architect of India's Constitution.

"During the 1970s, one of the biggest challenges we faced was Article 21 (of the Constitution) was suspended and the government succeeded in convincing the Supreme Court that if Article 21 was suspended - and it was suspendable - the citizens of India have lost the right to life and liberty. This was dictatorship at its worst. The biggest right is the right to life. Today if someone comes in front of the cameras and gives an irresponsible comment, we call it intolerance,"  he said.

"Dangers to the constitutional order can come when constitutional systems are used to subvert them," he added.

He went on to list events that led to Hitler's dictatorship in Germany and said: "We need to be reminded of our history."

Jaitley stopped short of spelling it out but appeared to mock the statement coined by a Congress leader in the past on former prime minister Indira Gandhi, who imposed Emergency rule - "Indira is India and India is Indira."

He said that Hitler's advisor always ended his speech with a sentence: "Adolf Hitler is Germany and Germany is Adolf Hitler."

On Thursday, Congress President Sonia Gandhi said in the Lok Sabha: "There cannot be a bigger joke than those who never had faith in the Constitution nor had they participated in its drafting, are now swearing by it and are laying claim to it."