A day after the Chief Judicial Magistrate’s court in Surat convicted former Congress president Rahul Gandhi in a criminal defamation case over his Modi surname remark, the Lok Sabha Secretariat on Friday issued a notification to disqualify Mr. Gandhi as the Lok Sabha member from Wayanad. Calling it a “black day” for Indian democracy, the Congress accused the ruling party of “strangulating” democracy by trying to silence the voices of Mr. Gandhi and other Opposition leaders. It would fight the battle legally as well as politically, the party said, and announced a nationwide agitation against the disqualification. Mr. Gandhi, who had come to the Lok Sabha in the morning and attended a meeting of Congress MPs before the notification was issued, later tweeted, “I am fighting for the voice of India. I am ready to pay any price.” Stating that the Wayanad MP’s disqualification from Lok Sabha was the natural outcome of the court order and emphasising that the law was equal for everyone, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was quick to claim that Mr. Gandhi’s 2019 comment about the Modi surname was an insult to Other Backward Classes (OBC). At an election rally ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha poll, Mr. Gandhi had said: “I have a question. Why do all of them — all of these thieves — have Modi Modi Modi in their names? Nirav Modi, Lalit Modi, Narendra Modi. And if we search a bit more, many more Modis will come out.” While BJP president J.P. Nadda said that such remarks reflected the Congress leader’s “pathetic and casteist mindset”, Mr. Gandhi found support from Oppositions leaders, including those who had earlier maintained a distance from the Congress such as Mamata Banerjee of the Trinamool Congress, Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party, K. Chandrasekhar Rao of the Bharat Rashtra Samithi and Arvind Kejriwal of the Aam Admi Party. Unless the conviction is stayed by a higher court, Mr. Gandhi will be barred from contesting elections for the next eight years.
Congress member in the Rajya Sabha and senior Supreme Court advocate Abhishek Singhvi, who is advising Mr. Gandhi, was hopeful of getting a stay. The Congress has also questioned the timing, with Parliament being stalled over the demand for a Joint Parliamentary Committee probe on the allegations against the Adani Group on stock manipulation and other misdeeds which the group has denied. Mr. Gandhi was serving his fourth term in the Lok Sabha. First elected to the House in 2004 from Amethi, he represented that constituency for two more terms. In 2019, while he lost the Amethi seat to the BJP’s Smriti Irani, he won from Wayanad in Kerala. In an editorial, The Hindu said both the conviction and sentence raise legal questions. “The correctness of the judgment will be decided on appeal, but the political cost to Mr. Gandhi in the form of disqualification from the House and from electoral contest will have a lasting impact, unless he obtains a stay on the conviction rather than mere suspension of sentence,” it said. “In a country that often frets over criminalisation of politics, corruption and hate speeches, it is ironic that criminal defamation should overwhelm the political career of a prominent leader. A modern democracy should not treat defamation as a criminal offence at all,” the editorial pointed out. It is a legacy of an era in which questioning authority was considered a grave crime. In contemporary times, criminal defamation mainly acts as a tool to suppress criticism of public servants and corporate misdeeds. In 2016, the Supreme Court upheld criminal defamation without adequate regard to the chilling effect it has on free speech, and to that, one must now add, political opposition and dissent. Opposition parties expressing dismay at the verdict against Mr. Gandhi should include abolishing criminal defamation in their agenda. With general elections due in 2024, the disqualification of Rahul Gandhi will be seen as an attempt to stifle free speech, political opposition and dissent, and that makes this story important.
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The Hindu’s Daily News Quiz
A court in which city convicted Congress leader Rahul Gandhi in a defamation case, giving him a two-year prison sentence?
- Surat
- Bhopal
- Lucknow
- Delhi
To know the answer and to play the full quiz, click here.
