The BJP Tuesday took Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi head on, saying he was ill-informed about the 1984 anti-sikh riots.

Rahul Gandhi, in a TV interview Monday night, said the difference between the 1984 riots and the 2002 riots in Gujarat was that in the former, the government was trying to stop the violence while in Gujarat, the government was abetting and pushing the riots.

“Rahul Gandhi is ill-informed. In 1984, police hardly fired at the rioters, it was in collusion with the government. In Gujarat, 300 rioters died in police firing. Around 65,000 rioters were arrested in Gujarat… more than 4,000 cases have been chargesheeted and hundreds have been convicted,” Bharatiya Janata Party leader Arun Jaitley said.

“Even the chief minister has gone through enquiries. What did they (Congress) do in 1984,” Jaitley questioned.

“Which Congressman has ended in jail because of 1984? The call for ‘khoon ka badla khoon’ (an eye for an eye) was heard in AIIMS (All India Institute of Medical Science) first,” he said.

Then prime minister Indira Gandhi was taken to AIIMS after being shot by her Sikh bodyguards.

Asked about Rahul Gandhi’s refusal to apologise, Jaitley said: “We are not expecting him to go that far. We are just expecting him to have correct lessons of history.”

Party leader Ravi Shankar Prasad, meanwhile, said Rahul Gandhi knows “defeat stares at his face” as he shied away from a debate with its prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi.

“Rahul recognises certain defeat stares at his face,” Bharatiya Janata Party leader Ravi Shankar Prasad said, referring to Rahul Gandhi’s TV interview.

“He had no answer to the repeated questions on Modi being given a clean chit (for the Gujarat riots). When he was asked why he chose to run away from a direct competition with Modi, he had nothing to say,” Prasad told Times Now.

“…In contrast to Rahul, you have Modi who was born in poverty, who has come up because of his hard work,” Prasad added.

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