NEW DELHI — The expulsion of India’s top opposition leader from parliament Friday has prompted a rare display of solidarity among a dozen of the country’s opposition political parties who condemned the move.
India’s top opposition leader Gandhi expelled from parliament after verdict
March 24, 2023
Opposition leaders described Gandhi’s disqualification on Friday as the “murder of democracy,” “a cowardly act,” an attempt to “silence the voice of the opposition” and called for its withdrawal. Derek O’Brien, a member of parliament from the Trinamool Congress party described the moment as the “lowest in the history of parliamentary democracy.”
“I am fighting for the voice of India. I will pay any price for it,” Gandhi tweeted on Friday.
The move by speaker Om Birla, an appointee and long standing member of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, also means that Gandhi will be barred from contesting elections for the next six years. India is scheduled to go to polls next year in a crucial election that will determine whether Narendra Modi gets a third consecutive term as prime minister.
Members of Gandhi’s party took to the streets in Gujarat, Rajpur, Lucknow, Delhi and several other parts of India to protest the disqualification of their leader. In a news conference on Friday evening, Congress spokesman Abhishek Manu Singhvi described the disqualification as part of the “systematic and repetitive emasculation of democratic institutions by the ruling party.”
On Thursday, a court in Gujarat, Modi’s home state, convicted Gandhi of criminally defaming all those with the Modi last name for comments he made during the 2019 election campaign and sentenced him to two years in prison. While the sentence was suspended pending an appeal, it opened the way for Gandhi’s parliamentary expulsion.
Several members of Modi’s ruling party welcomed the speaker’s decision to disqualify Gandhi hailing it as the lawful punishment for what they describe as his derogatory remarks against all people belonging to the prime minister’s caste.Rather than an attack on Modi or corruption, BJP politicians have been portraying the remarks as “caste-ist” and insulting to India’s lower classes.
The central leadership of the Congress Party is meeting Friday evening to discuss how to respond.
Gandhi, who represented the Wayanad constituency from the southern Indian state of Kerala, was dismissed under a law enacted a decade ago to keep convicted criminals out of electoral politics. The Association for Democratic Reforms, a nonprofit organization focused on electoral reforms in India, found that as many as 43 percent of the members of Parliament have criminal cases pending against them, predominantly from the ruling BJP.
In the past few years, this provision has been used to disqualify opposition politicians as soon as they are found guilty of criminal offenses by lower courts in India. On Friday, 14 opposition parties approached the Supreme Court asking for it to urgently intervene and stop the government from misusing law enforcement agencies against political opponents.
By Anant Gupta