Opinion Express View: Rahul Gandhi’s disqualification from Parliament the day after a conviction for a speech erodes democracy

One sentence, ill advised as it was, is picked up from a long-ish 2019 election speech by Rahul Gandhi in Kolar, Karnataka. A complaint is made by a BJP leader in Surat who claims he is aggrieved by its disparaging reference to “thieves” who are “Modis”. In 2023, amid a storm in Parliament led by ministers and ruling party MPs against Rahul’s comments in London on Indian democracy “in danger”, a Surat court convicts him for defaming an imagined community. Within 24 hours of the verdict, the Lok Sabha Secretariat, in accordance with Section 8(3) of the Representation of People Act, 1951, disqualifies Rahul as Lok Sabha MP, even as the court gives him a period of 30 days to appeal – ironically, in this, Rahul’s own brash act of tearing up the UPA ordinance that would have allowed a convicted MLA/MP to continue in office till appeals were disposed of, has returned to haunt. Only days earlier, Rahul was at the receiving end of the BJP’s formidable firepower for making a speech in Parliament alleging the Narendra Modi government’s complicities in the rise and rise (before the recent market blip) of the House of Adanis. The sense is unmistakable — of overstretched law, opportunistically weaponised rule and unabashed institutional haste in the disqualification of Rahul Gandhi, MP. It raises serious questions about a politics of vindictiveness that will go to great and greater lengths to disallow space to the political opponent.

Of course, the three Rahul controversies — his attack on the PM in Parliament, his remarks in Cambridge and his Kolar speech — are disconnected. They involve different institutional processes and platforms. On the face of it, also, those three furores have nothing to do with the lodging of 44 FIRs and arrest of four persons, including two printing press owners, by Delhi Police, after posters, including some seeking the ouster of PM Modi (“Modi hatao, desh bachao”), were found pasted on walls and poles in the national Capital. But look closer, and a line runs through them. It points to a powerful government that has a large mandate and that, by all accounts, holds on to its popularity – but one that shows a disturbingly thin skin, and a willingness to use any means, thinly disguised as legal process, to bludgeon its adversary. A ruling establishment that abandons humility as it equates itself to the nation and to the state – else, why should criticism of a government be deemed scandalous, even anti-national, in the country or on foreign shores? It points to institutions of the state, the local thana and the local court, showing a lack of due diligence and application of mind, and giving those in power the benefit of the doubt, and the right of way.

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The verdict of the Surat court that fixates on a sentence, and the alacrity of the Lok Sabha Secretariat do not just add up to the forced exit of the Wayanad MP from Parliament. They also add to the deepening impression of the increasing hardness of the state. How does Parliament minus Rahul help the BJP or the Centre? That’s a valid question but a secondary one. The primary message is that a campaign speech seen to insult the Prime Minister could get you out of the House you were elected to, printing critical posters could get you arrested. In the run-up to Elections 2024, as the Modi government moves ahead with these heavy steps and the long arm of the law, it must look at its G20 posters on democracy — and then in the mirror.