Restoration of Rahul Gandhi's Lok Sabha Membership Is a Rebuke to Narendra Modi
Restoration of Rahul Gandhi's Lok Sabha Membership Is a Rebuke to Narendra Modi
m.u.h
08/08/2023717
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The August 4 Supreme Court judgment in the Modi surname criminal defamation suit which had sought to end Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s tenure in Parliament, jail him for two years and debar him from being a MP for eight years is, in its truest import, a stinging rebuke of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ways of attaining his political goals.
The restoration of Gandhi’s membership of the Lok Sabha by the top court has energised the prime minister’s opponents, and deflated his party and its followers. In the foreseeable future, this is likely to bring Modi difficulties and serious challenges – from his opponents, but probably also from within his own political and ideological universe if things slide some more for him.
It is this awareness that now appears to make the prime minister more aggressive even by the standards of aggression against opponents (from within his own party and outside) that he has cultivated through his political career – first in his home state Gujarat and then in the national sphere.
Hardly a day passes when, irrespective of context, he does not seek to mount crass linguistic offensives against INDIA, the opposition parties grouping that includes the Congress, sinking to juvenile levels in the process.
Last Saturday, for example, while green-lighting the renovation of 506 railway stations online, Modi went to ask his listeners to ‘Quit India’, a play on the Quit India movement that began on August 9, 1942, a historical anti-colonial tide with which the RSS, the BJP’s mother ship, had conspicuously refused to associate itself because it was busy playing pro-British politics in that era, severely denting its claim to Indian nationalism.
Narendra Modi ko gussa kyon ata hai? Why is Narendra Modi angry? The answer lies in plain sight: For the first time since he entered politics, Modi finds himself up against a determined, steely, ideological opponent, one who cannot be frightened or bribed and who goes out into the open and exposes the truth about the Modi regime as he sees it – and this is done with a rare boldness and vigour, making the strongman anxious that a third term as prime minister, that he so hankers after, may yet elude him.
Gandhi’s core ideology of confronting the RSS-BJP goal – especially as articulated by Modi – of transforming this country of multiple exegeses, traditions and pathways to life, thought and politics, into a gigantic prison-house of supremacist thought of the religious majority in which deviations are punished with violence, is what has irked the prime minister most about his much younger opponent.
Since supremacist thought and action is hard to divorce from the nurturing of big business interests in Indian conditions, and the prime minister is probably the best illustration of this, Gandhi has unfailingly directed his energies to challenging the Modi government’s policy orientation which has brought widespread suffering upon the poor and the less privileged sections of society.
In the last session of Parliament, the Congress leader’s gut punch to the prime minister on his apparently closer than close purported association with the tycoon Gautam Adani was the proximate cause that led the ruling dispensation to do its best to seek his removal from the political scene, although almost his entire speech was expunged from the records by a ruling party that seems to fear Gandhi’s forays into truth.
The backdrop to the fearsome Parliament speech was the Congress leader’s dramatic Bharat Jodo Yatra, the nearly 4,000-kilometre-long march joined by thousands, in the course of which he pressed his belief in communal harmony and peace, and the upliftment of the poorer classes.
Gandhi was overnight transformed into a hero after the feat, a champion of the masses, shedding his earlier image of a lackadaisical, uninterested politician and dynast. Modi, on the other hand, went from being a mass leader to a vengeful power-seeker out to use underhand means to get rid of opponents to gain his objective as he went about mounting majoritarian war through the agency of lumpen armed gangs as the state looked away, giving tax breaks to the super-rich, and keeping an uncaring silence as small and big fires burnt.
In arguing for the staying of conviction in the criminal defamation case, apart from advancing legal and technical arguments, Gandhi’s counsel had urged that he was within his rights, as an opposition figure, to criticise the prime minister and his government, and that this is what he had done. With the appeal being upheld by the top court, the message will go out across the board that in a democracy it is legitimate – indeed necessary – to criticise the leader of government.
This punches a hole into the assumption carefully cultivated by the ruling dispensation that authoritarian rule is natural in a country such as India where people desire a so-called strong government. Its corollary – the invincibility of Modi and the placing of the ruler above criticism as in the long discarded feudal order of yore – now lies discredited even as an argument.
News reports suggest that Gandhi will take part in the no-confidence motion debate in the Lok Sabha. The country will be all ears, and the treasury benches will have anxious moments. Modi will no doubt be worrying about how to tackle this unexpected turn of events. Will the censor’s red pencil be applied once again to Gandhi’s speech, as it had been when he tore into the prime minister on the Adani affair following the publication of the Hindenburg report?
If it is, then there could be political turmoil, with silent resentment already brewing. In his new avatar, Gandhi has emerged as the unifier of dissent in the country and the pivot of peaceful political resistance. In universalising among the people a new force that does not fear autocracy, Gandhi has led to the deepening of the spirit of democracy.
The Lok Sabha notification of August 7 restoring Gandhi’s membership of the House in the wake of the Supreme Court order ends ominously. It says the earlier Lok Sabha order of March 24 (which had jettisoned Gandhi from the House) has “ceased to operate subject to further judicial pronouncements”. If this embodies an implied threat, then we could be courting trouble. Good sense demands that underhand means and the harassment of political opponents be eschewed.
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