NEW DELHI – Top Indian opposition figure Rahul Gandhi said on Saturday his disqualification from Parliament was retribution for his demanding a probe into Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s relationship with controversial tycoon Gautam Adani.
“Please understand why I have been disqualified,” he told reporters. “I have been disqualified because the prime minister… is scared of the next speech that is going to come on Adani.”
Mr Modi’s allies succeeded in having Mr Gandhi disqualified 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.
The sentence in that trial, two years in prison, happens to be the statutory minimum penalty that renders a sitting Member of Parliament ineligible for office.
New national elections are scheduled to take place early in 2024, and whatever luck Mr Gandhi and his lawyers find in court, the defamation verdict seems likely to keep him and the Congress party mired in legal defence for years to come.
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 before the 2024 elections.
Mr Gandhi, 52, has been building up his own profile lately.
He rallied the public with a grassroots march across India – 4,000km 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.
BJP campaigns remain incontestably well-managed at the local, state and national levels, and changes in election-financing rules under consecutive BJP governments have even further bent the electoral odds the party’s way. REUTERS, NYTIMES
