Gandhi, who served 19 years in the Indian legislature, was removed from office after being found guilty of defaming Modi’s surname in a case filed in 2019 by a politician from the prime minister’s party. Gandhi was found guilty of defamation this week and sentenced by a court in Modi’s home state to two years in prison, which under Indian law allowed the Speaker of Parliament to suspend him from politics.
India is due to go to the polls next year in a general election that will determine whether Modi gets a third consecutive term as prime minister.
In an unusual show of solidarity on Friday, more than a dozen Indian political parties – including a right-wing party in Maharashtra, the center-left party that governs West Bengal, communists and caste movements in northern India – have emerged to voice their support for Gandhi and criticize his expulsion as a dangerous precedent for India’s political institutions.
“It’s a direct murder of democracy,” said Uddhav Thackeray, a former chief minister of Maharashtra and leader of a right-wing party in the state, which includes the financial hub of Mumbai. Other parties have variously called Gandhi’s expulsion “a cowardly act” and an attempt to “Silence the voice of the opposition” and called for withdrawal of eviction.
Meanwhile, members of Gandhi’s party, the Indian National Congress, took to the streets in Gujarat, Rajpur, Lucknow, Delhi and several other parts of India to protest the disqualification of their leader, sometimes clashing with the police.
Gandhi signaled on Friday that he was ready to go to prison. “I fight for the voice of India,” he wrote on Twitter. “I will pay any price for this. »
The court hearing the Gandhi case in Gujarat convicted Gandhi of criminally defaming anyone who bore the Modi surname due to comments he made during the 2019 election campaign. BJP officials argued that by comparing Modis to “thieves” during the election campaign, Gandhi defamed all Indians who bore that surname and were members of the Modi caste.
Although the sentence was suspended pending an appeal, it paved the way for Gandhi’s removal from Parliament.
Gandhi’s ouster comes amid increasingly urgent warnings from academics, political analysts and opposition parties that the country is sliding towards authoritarianism. Hours before Gandhi’s expulsion on Friday, 14 opposition parties approached the Supreme Court asking it to stop the government from using law enforcement to shackle political opponents.
In a Friday night press conference, Congress spokesman Abhishek Manu Singhvi described Gandhi’s disqualification as part of “the ruling party’s systematic and repetitive emasculation of democratic institutions”.
Several members of Modi’s ruling party publicly welcomed Gandhi’s ouster on Friday, hailing it as a legal punishment.
But they also clarified that the expulsion was linked to other public comments by Gandhi that infuriated members of the Indian right. In recent months, the Congress leader has been one of the most vocal critics of the Modi government and the prime minister’s ties to Indian tycoon Gautam Adani. In several speeches in Britain, Gandhi urged the public to pay attention to what he called India’s declining democracy – calls that BJP officials condemned as tantamount to inviting the West to s interfere in the internal affairs of India.
Speaking to reporters on Friday, Modi’s Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav reiterated that not only had Gandhi defamed Modi’s caste, but that he should also “work for the democracy of the country instead of going in London and insult him”.
India’s Broadcasting Minister Anurag Thakur, also a member of the BJP, told a news conference on Friday that the disqualification showed Gandhi he was not above the law.
“Making false accusations, using uncivilized language, insulting people and using rude words had become a habit for him,” Thakur said.
