Opinion Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma writes: Rahul Gandhi’s disqualification is his own doing — he tore up the ordinance that would have protected him

The genesis of Rahul Gandhi’s disqualification lies in his voluntary response to two legal cases. In Purnesh Ishvarbhai Modi vs Rahul Gandhi, he made some uncharitable remarks against an OBC community, following which one of the aggrieved parties took him to court. During the trial over the past four years, the court gave him multiple opportunities to apologise and end the matter. Instead, Rahul Gandhi categorically refused, feigned loss of memory and provided other trivial excuses. His conduct left the court with no option but to find him guilty. It is pertinent to underline the fact that rendering an apology isn’t an alien concept to Gandhi — he did so before the Supreme Court in the Rafale case.

The second case is Lily Thomas vs Union of India, where Rahul Gandhi was not a direct party but nonetheless used his political influence in 2013, to arm-twist and scuttle the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s attempt to provide some relief to those affected by this judgment.

Prior to Lily Thomas, Section 8(4) of the Representation of People’s Act, 1951, read: “… a disqualification under either subsection shall not, in the case of a person who on the date of the conviction is a member of Parliament or the Legislature of a State, take effect until three months have elapsed from that date or, if within that period an appeal or application for revision is brought in respect of the conviction or the sentence, until that appeal or application is disposed of by the court.” In short, Section 8(4) provided three-month protection from disqualification to convicted MPs and MLAs.

Let us peruse the sequence of this case and its subsequent timeline. On July 10, 2013, Justice A K Patnaik and S J Mukhopadhyay of the Supreme Court held Section 8(4) to be ultra vires the Constitution and ruled disqualification post-conviction to be automatic and immediate. Following this, the UPA government filed a review petition, which was dismissed by the Court after an unprecedented hearing in an open court.

On August 30, 2013, then Law Minister Kapil Sibal moved a Bill in the Rajya Sabha to not give immediate effect to the July 10, 2013 judgement. The Bill proposed that convicted MPs and MLAs will not be immediately disqualified. However, they will not be able to vote or draw a salary until their appeal is heard.

On September 24, 2013, the Union Cabinet, headed by a Congress Prime Minister, unanimously passed the Representation of the People (Amendment and Validation) Ordinance, 2013 to nullify the Lily Thomas judgment. This happened after due political clearance was received by Congress’s Core Committee headed by Sonia Gandhi.

On September 27, 2013, Union Minister Ajay Maken held a press conference to defend the passage of the ordinance. Suddenly, Rahul Gandhi walked into the meeting and denounced the ordinance of his own government. Maken made a dramatic u-turn and declared Rahul Gandhi’s stand as the official stand of the Congress. All this happened hours ahead of the then Prime Minister’s bilateral meeting with US President Barack Obama in Washington DC.

These facts make it crystal clear that Rahul Gandhi was solely responsible for denying any relief to MPs and MLAs who get immediately disqualified on conviction. Post his intervention, the then Attorney General Goolam Vahanvati wrote to his own government that once an MP/MLA is convicted, the Speaker of the House has no role to play, and disqualification is deemed instant.

On October 21, Congress’s Rashid Masood became the first MP to get disqualified under the Lily Thomas judgment. It is pertinent to note that neither Rahul Gandhi nor the Congress Party uttered a single word when Masood was disqualified.

Between Masood’s and Gandhi’s disqualifications, 16 other MPs and MLAs have been disqualified on the same grounds as the latter. Amongst these, many are Congress MPs/MLAs or lawmakers who are old allies of the Congress – for example, Lalu Prasad of the RJD, T M Selvaganapathy of DMK, Bandhu Tirkey, Pradeep Chaudhary and Mamta Devi belonging to Congress. Has a single Congress leader stood up to say “democracy has been scuttled” or asked foreign powers to rescue democracy in any of these cases? Among the 18 lawmakers to be disqualified to date, there are also lawmakers belonging to BJP and its allies. Did any BJP leader wear black clothes in protest?

But when the 18th lawmaker – Rahul Gandhi – was disqualified due to the moral high ground that he himself had taken, what did he do? Just the way he humiliated Manmohan Singh in 2013, he again misguided Mallikarjun Kharge in 2023 and instigated him to protest the so-called death of democracy.

There has been duplicity in the conduct of Rahul Gandhi. I urge his well-wishers such as Kapil Sibal to refresh their memory of the events of 2013 and stop endorsing Gandhi’s self-goal as an imaginary assault on Indian democracy.

Our Constitution provides an independent judiciary and in our political careers, we face legal setbacks. The response to any adverse court order is to seek refuge through appeals in the higher judiciary. But Congress’s response, when it comes to an adverse order on Rahul Gandhi, is to defame and malign the judiciary. This selective approach to tarnish institutions in certain adverse instances is the most undemocratic choice a political party can make. It shakes the core of democracy and our Constitution. Democratic values are ingrained in our DNA and the people of this country will neither forgive nor forget such politics.

The writer is the Chief Minister of Assam