Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi has said that he is willing to “take responsibility for everything bad that the Congress has done in its history”, including the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.

Gandhi’s comments were made on April 21 in response to a question by a Sikh student at Brown University in the United States. The Congress leader was conversing with political scientist Ashutosh Varshney at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

The video of the discussion was uploaded on the institute’s YouTube channel on Saturday.

Large-scale riots broke out in Delhi on October 31, 1984, after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, who was the prime minister at the time, by her Sikh bodyguards. Mobs, allegedly helped by some Congress leaders, had attacked Sikhs and torched their homes. Nearly 3,000 Sikhs were killed in Delhi alone.

Asked by the student what he was doing to reconcile with the community, Gandhi said: “I don’t think that anything scares the Sikhs. The statement I made was that do we want an India where people are uncomfortable to express their religion?”

He added: “As far as mistakes of the Congress party are concerned, a lot of those mistakes happened when I was not there, but I am more than happy to take responsibility for everything that the Congress party has ever done wrong in its history.”

“I have publicly stated that what happened in the [1980s] was wrong,” Gandhi added. “I have been to the Golden Temple multiple times, I have an extremely good relationship with the Sikh community in India and a loving relationship with them.”

In February, a Delhi court sentenced former Congress MP Sajjan Kumar to life imprisonment for the murder of two men during the 1984 riots. This was Kumar’s second conviction linked to the riots.

The Bharatiya Janata Party called for the expulsion of senior Congress leaders such as Jagdish Tytler and Kamal Nath who are accused of involvement in the riots, The Indian Express reported. Tytler and Nath have denied the allegations.

BJP is a ‘fringe group’, says Gandhi

Gandhi also made remarks about religion and Indian values.

“All great political thinkers, social reformers and you go back 3,000 years – Buddha, Guru Nanak, Basava in Karnataka, Narayana Guru in Kerala, Phule, Gandhi, Ambedkar, and you see one stream,” Gandhi was quoted as saying by PTI. “None of these are bigots… All these people, the voices of whom are in our Constitution, are essentially saying the same thing, that carry everybody along [with] truth and nonviolence.”

“This to me is the bedrock of Indian tradition and Indian history,” he added. “I don’t know one person whom we consider great in India who wasn’t of this type. All our mythological figures… Lord Ram was of that kind, where he was forgiving, he was compassionate.”

Gandhi added: “So, I don’t consider what the BJP says to be the Hindu idea at all. I consider the Hindu idea to be much more pluralistic, much more embracing, much more affectionate, much more tolerant and open.”

Gandhi also described the BJP as a “fringe group”, saying, “I don’t view the BJP conception as a Hindu conception”.

BJP Spokesperson Pradeep Bhandari said that Congress, which “used words like Hindu terrorism, did not believe in the existence of Lord Ram and made every possible effort to not build the Ram temple in Ayodhya, its anti-Hindu face stands exposed today”, PTI reported.

Addressing foreign policy and security issues, the leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha said: “Now China and Pakistan are fused. So, any conflict we have will probably involves both of them together.”

He added that China had monopolised manufacturing and United States President Donald Trump had “diagnosed this problem accurately”.

On trade policy under Trump, he said: “We don’t know how it [India] is responding. Because they [the Centre] don’t tell us these things. Donald Trump is negotiating. We should negotiate right back.”