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Leader of India’s Opposition to Modi Is Expelled From Parliament Leader of India’s Opposition to Modi Is Expelled From Parliament
(about 5 hours later)
NEW DELHI — Rahul Gandhi, one of the last national figures standing in political opposition to Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, was disqualified as a member of Parliament on Friday, sending shock waves across the country’s political scene and devastating the once-powerful Indian National Congress party Mr. Gandhi leads. NEW DELHI — Rahul Gandhi went to battle against Prime Minister Narendra Modi in elections four years ago waving the banner of India’s multi-sectarian tradition and characterizing Mr. Modi as a dangerous Hindu nationalist who would whittle away the country’s democracy if he remained in power.
Mr. Gandhi was expelled from the lower house the day after a court in Gujarat, Mr. Modi’s home state, convicted him on a charge of criminal defamation. The charge stemmed from a comment he made on the campaign trail in 2019, characterizing Mr. Modi as one of a group of “thieves” named Modi referring to two prominent fugitives with the same last name. Mr. Gandhi received a two-year prison sentence, the maximum. He is out on 30 days’ bail. A Modi landslide in that 2019 vote all but buried Mr. Gandhi and the storied party his family had led for generations, the Indian National Congress.
Any jail sentence of two years or more is supposed to result in automatic expulsion, but legal experts had expected Mr. Gandhi to have the chance to challenge his conviction. A notification signed by a parliamentary bureaucrat appointed by Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party on Friday stated that Mr. Gandhi had been disqualified automatically by the conviction itself, per the Constitution of India. And on Friday, Mr. Modi’s allies moved to finish the job: Officials disqualified Mr. Gandhi from his seat in Parliament, just a day after a court found him guilty of criminal defamation over a line at a 2019 campaign speech in which he likened Mr. Modi to a pair of prominent “thieves” with the same last name. The move came before he had any chance to appeal.
“They are destroying the constitution, killing it,” said Srinivas B.V., president of the Indian National Congress Party’s youth wing. “The court gave Mr. Gandhi 30 days to appeal against the order, and hardly 24 hours have passed since.” The sentence in that trial, two years in prison, happens to be the statutory minimum penalty that renders a sitting parliamentarian ineligible for office. New national elections are scheduled to take place early next year, and whatever luck Mr. Gandhi and his lawyers find in court, the defamation verdict seems likely to keep him and Congress mired in legal defense for years to come.
Mr. Gandhi said in a Twitter post on Friday, “I am fighting for the voice of this country. I am ready to pay any price.” It was the boldest stroke yet by Mr. Modi’s allies to winnow out potential rivals and move against sources of dissent, in what is being seen broadly as a consolidation of power ahead of next year’s elections.
Mr. Srinivas said the party will fight the expulsion, politically and legally. One of the party’s most prominent members, Shashi Tharoor, who like Mr. Gandhi is a member of the lower house in the state of Kerala, said on Twitter that the action ending his tenure in Parliament was “politics with the gloves off, and it bodes ill for our democracy.” Mr. Modi is fond of reminding world leaders that India is the biggest democracy on the planet. But his critics accuse him and his Bharatiya Janata Party, known as the B.J.P., of trying to twist the country’s political system into something more akin to an electoral autocracy, with himself as total leader.
Mr. Gandhi, a scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family whose father, grandmother and great-grandfather served as prime minister, has taken pains to improve his national profile in recent months. He led an unexpectedly popular march late last year across swaths of India, rallying crowds to “unite India” against the Hindu-first nationalism espoused by Mr. Modi. And since the fortunes of Gautam Adani, a tycoon long associated with Mr. Modi, collapsed under pressure from a short-seller’s report in January, Mr. Gandhi has been using his platform in Parliament to call for an investigation of his business empire. “The speed with which the system moved is astonishing,” the Congress politician P.C. Chidambaram said in a post on Twitter, commenting on Mr. Ghandi’s removal. “No time is spent on reflection, understanding or allowing time for legal review.”
The Congress Party is not alone in worrying about the implications for India’s democracy that Mr. Gandhi’s disqualification poses. With parliamentary elections coming next year, the government's attempts to clamp down on dissent seem to be gaining momentum, other opposition leaders pointed out. Mr. Modi’s march against India’s traditional array of power-sharing arrangements has been accelerating across many fronts, with the Congress party and its debilitated prospects merely one casualty.
Last month, Manish Sisodia, the second in command of the Aam Aadmi Party, was arrested on charges related to fraud. Earlier this month Kavitha K., a leader from a regional party that recently turned to national politics, was questioned by federal investigators in connection with the same case. “This fight is not Rahul Gandhi’s fight. This fight is not the Congress party’s fight. This is a fight to save this country from a dictator, from a less-educated person,” said Arvind Kejriwal, the leader of the Aam Aadmi Party, which bills itself as the strongest alternative to either the B.J.P. or Congress. “It’s a fight to save this country from an arrogant person.”
The string of criminal cases against politicians though none have been brought against high-profile members of Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P. contrasts awkwardly with Mr. Modi’s presentation of India as “the Mother of Democracy” during a global publicity blitz to accompany its hosting the Group of 20 summit meeting this year. Mr. Kejriwal’s own right-hand man, Manish Sisodia, was tossed in jail last month and buried in criminal charges stemming from complex allegations of liquor-licensing fraud. His health minister has been jailed as well, on allegations of money laundering.
Police raids against the BBC’s office in India and some of the country’s leading think tanks have intensified doubts about the strength of India’s democracy. Eliminating the opposition from parliament through the courts might heighten those misgivings dramatically. The Enforcement Directorate, one of a handful of agencies that answer indirectly to Mr. Modi’s government, has set its sights on other up-and-coming politicians, including Kalvakuntla Kavitha from the state of Telangana. Like Mr. Kejriwal’s party, Ms. Kavitha’s had started vying for a national role.
It is a fractured opposition field that has made little headway against Mr. Modi, who is tremendously popular, with approval ratings consistently at 70 percent or more in polls.
Mr. Gandhi, 52, had been building up his own profile lately. He had rallied the public with a grass-roots march across India — 2,500 miles over five months — in which he railed against Mr. Modi’s power.
“Every democratic institution was shut for us by the government: Parliament, media, elections,” Mr. Gandhi told supporters in Madhya Pradesh state in November. “There was no other way but to hit the streets to listen and connect with people.”
But even before his conviction, political analysts did not see that Congress or any other party stood a realistic chance of displacing Mr. Modi in the 2024 elections. B.J.P. campaigns remain incontestably well-managed at the local, state and national levels, and changes in election-financing rules under consecutive B.J.P. governments have even further bent the electoral odds the party’s way.
So the rough treatment for Mr. Gandhi presents a puzzle — and, perhaps, a potential rallying cry for a struggling opposition.
In an unusual show of unity on Friday, before Mr. Gandhi’s disqualification was announced, 14 political parties united to put their names before a petition to the country’s Supreme Court, asking it to set guidelines to limit what they call “arbitrary” actions by investigating agencies against the politicians.
Derek O’Brien, the spokesman for one of the parties that has managed to stave off Mr. Modi’s B.J.P. at the regional level, said in a video that what Mr. Modi was doing was “the lowest in the history of parliamentary democracy.”
The Supreme Court agreed to hear the parties’ petition on April 5. In the past some of the same politicians have insinuated that the court does the government’s bidding. But on Friday they turned to it as a last hope.
The current chief justice of India, Dhananjaya Chandrachud, has spoken often of lessons from the so-called Emergency of 1975, when then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi — Rahul’s grandmother — rolled up Indians’ civil liberties and suspended democracy formally. During the two years before elections were reinstated, and Mrs. Gandhi was defeated, it was his fellow judges “who kept the torch of liberty burning,” he said.
On Sunday, speaking at a media awards ceremony, Mr. Chandrachud appealed on behalf of another unelected element of India’s democratic architecture: He warned that “the press must remain free if a country is to remain a democracy.”
A day before the speech, Irfan Mehraj, a journalist in Kashmir, was arrested by the National Investigation Agency on charges of terrorism. Such detentions and legal harassment have become routine for journalists, particularly for Muslim reporters.
International organizations, media and otherwise, have felt the screws tightening, too. In February, after the B.B.C. aired a documentary in Britain that faulted Mr. Modi for his role in Hindu-Muslim massacres that killed about 1,000 people in Gujarat in 2002, the tax authorities raided its offices in Delhi. The most-esteemed independent think tank in India was raided months earlier, and last month lost its permission to raise funds from abroad.
The operations of Amnesty International, Oxfam India and other groups have been suspended for similar reasons. Yet Mr. Modi’s government faces little criticism from abroad. In geopolitical terms, everything seems to be going his way.
The war in Ukraine and worries about China have made the rest of the world more inclined than ever to turn to India, whether for military or diplomatic alliances or for the rerouting of supply chains.
One of the rare sore spots for Mr. Modi in public has been the recent crash of the Adani Group, a corporate giant led by a close ally who is one of the world’s richest men, Gautam Adani, 60. The prime minister has been visibly uncomfortable about it, and has not uttered the name Adani in public since the company took a beating at the hands of short-sellers and lost more than $135 billion in value.
Mr. Gandhi had been one of the most forceful Indian voices in raising the issue in Parliament, and in public speeches. His family says they believe that played a role in the maneuvers against him this week, after the defamation case had been stalled for months.
“The complainant himself had asked the case to be stayed,” said Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, a prominent Congress politician who is Mr. Gandhi’s sister. “The case was stayed for a year, and after my brother’s speech about Adani, how did the complainant revive that case all of a sudden?”