Former Home Minister P Chidambaram on Saturday defended Rahul Gandhi on the latter’s 1984 riots remark the Congress chief made during an interaction at an event in the UK Parliament on Friday.

Speaking to reporters in Kolkata, the senior Congress leader said that his party chief was “13 or 14” at the time and therefore cannot be held responsible.

“Congress was in office in 1984. A very terrible thing happened in 1984 for which Dr. Manmohan Singh apologised in Parliament. You can’t hold Rahul Gandhi responsible for that, he was 13 or 14. He hasn’t absolved anyone,” Chidambaram said.

“We think that the matter is serious enough that there should be a public debate and there should be a detailed inquiry. Which is why the Congress President and the party have raised it,” he said.

Speaking at the Grand Committee Room of the UK Parliament on Friday, Gandhi had reportedly denied the involvement of his party in the violence that broke out after the assassination of Indira Gandhi. The riots eventually led to the killing of nearly 3,000 Sikhs mostly in Delhi at a time when Congress was in power.

Gandhi had said, “Congress was not involved in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.”

To a question asked by the CNN-News18 about the riots, Gandhi said, “I have no confusion in my mind about that. It was a tragedy, it was a painful experience. You say that the Congress party was involved in that, I don’t agree with that. Certainly there was violence, certainly there was tragedy.”

Following his statement, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) demanded an apology from the Congress chief reminding him that former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had tendered an apology in the 2013 over the riots.

BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra slammed Gandhi saying that he has “undone everything, any leadership qualities that he had”.

Reacting to Gandhi’s statement, Sukhbir Singh Badal, president of Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), said on Saturday, “Rahul Gandhi has conveyed clear message, he is with those who killed innocent at that time. The statement given by Rahul Gandhi has added salt to the wounds of the victims.”

Gandhi, who is currently on a tour of UK and Germany, attacked the BJP of creating divisions in the society. He also equated the party’s ideological parent Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) with the Arab world’s Muslim Brotherhood and claimed that the idea of demonetisation came directly from the organisation headquartered in Nagpur.

Read More: RSS is similar to Muslim Brotherhood, says Rahul Gandhi in UK

The 47-year-old Congress president also accused the Prime Minister of not having any concrete strategy to deal with Pakistan or China.

“Doklam is not an isolated issue. It was a part of a sequence of events, it was a process. Prime Minister is episodic. He views Doklam as an event. If he was carefully watching the process, he could’ve stopped it,” he said at IISS, adding, “The truth is the Chinese are still in Doklam today.”