Maintenance

India: 'Rahul Gandhi won't let power silence him'

The leader of the main opposition party in the Indian Congress, Rahul Gandhi, holds a press conference after being disqualified as a lawmaker by the Indian Parliament, at the party's headquarters in New Delhi, March 25, 2023. REUTERS - ANUSHREE FADNAVIS

Text by: Tirthankar Chanda Follow

12 min

Victim of political vendetta, the Indian opponent Rahul Gandhi was ousted from Parliament, in the wake of his conviction by a court in Gujarat for defamation against Prime Minister Narendra Modi. While his lawyers have just filed an appeal to overturn the conviction, a second defamation complaint against the parliamentarian has opened in another state. Interview with the Indianist Jean-Luc Racine* on the real aims of this judicial harassment.

Advertising

Read more

RFI: On March 24, the day after he was sentenced to two years in prison, Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi was dismissed as an MP. His lawyers appealed against the conviction handed down by a court in the state of Gujarat. How can this case evolve?

Jean-Luc Racine: Obviously, it cannot be presumed what the decision of the Court of Appeal might be, confirming or reversing the decision of the first instance. This uncertainty further highlights the speed with which the secretariat of the lower house of the Indian Parliament disqualified the MP the day after his conviction on 23 April, without giving him time to appeal as required by the courts. He will go to jail if his appeal is rejected. On the other hand, I do not know if Rahul Gandhi will regain his mandate if he is cleared or if he will have to go through the election square again to return to Parliament. It should be noted, however, that the sentence of two years' imprisonment imposed on him corresponds to the period from which a Member may be removed from office. Of course, it is no coincidence that the court sentenced him to two years in prison.

In the Indian press, at least in the media still sympathetic to the opposition, there is astonishment at the disqualification of Rahul Gandhi as an MP before he has even been able to appeal the court's decision. Is this an abuse of power?

Indeed, there are not many examples of defamation cases that have led to this kind of sanction. It is also surprising to learn that the head of the lower house of the National Assembly, the "Lok Sabha", alone took the decision to disqualify the deputy, whereas, according to some constitutionalists, the normal procedure for expelling a member of Parliament requires that the President of the Republic be informed beforehand and that she has given her opinion on the file. These debates between constitutionalists are not surprising, especially since they are obviously an essentially political judgment. It is worth remembering why Rahul Gandhi was convicted. It was for comments made during the 2019 election campaign. "Why do all thieves have Modi as their last name?" he said, referring to two particular cases – a businessman on the run and a cricket executive – that were making headlines at the time. As these remarks were deemed defamatory, the case was brought to court by an elected representative from Gujarat who also called himself "Modi", but who had not been named by Rahul Gandhi in 2019. The complainant stated that Rahul Gandhi's comments defame the entire community of the least developed castes (the "Other Backward Castes" or OBCs) to which the Modi belong, including the complainant himself, but also Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. We thus have all the ingredients of a political case, especially since Rahul Gandhi has just been summoned by a court in Bihar where a new complaint has been filed against him for the same remarks, by another elected official named Modi.

What could be the consequences of these cases on Rahul Gandhi's personal political career?

These consequences will largely depend on the decision of the Court of Appeal. If the conviction is upheld at second instance, he will go to jail. However, it can already be said, based on the particularly combative remarks made by the person concerned since the beginning of the case, that the vigorous campaign that the opponent is waging against the government of Narendra Modi will not be diminished in any way by the fact that he is or is not in Parliament. He said he was not afraid to go to jail and that wherever he was, he would continue to advocate for a more democratic India and for answers to questions Indians have about the affairs of Indian tycoon Gautam Adani, who is suspected of unfairly winning contracts and accused by a US investment group of accounting fraud. It is clear that unless he is really imprisoned, and again, Gandhi will not let the government silence him.

He may not be silent, but he will not be able to run technically in the 2024 legislative elections. Is this the government's calculation in having it condemned by the courts?

Two hypotheses can be made. The first, and most obvious, is to explain the condemnation by the need of the Modi government to counter the renewed credibility of the Congress party, at least with a section of public opinion. This rebound is the result of the "unity march", the "Bharat Jodo Yatra", which Rahul Gandhi personally led across the country, between September 2022 and January 2023. The march that took him from Kanyakumari in the far south of India to Kashmir in the far north of the country drew crowds everywhere. It was seen as a personal success for the opposition leader and his party, the Indian National Congress. The Congress, which was the historic party of the struggle against British colonization, then the dominant party in Indian political life for decades after independence, has experienced a sharp decline since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, the "Bharat People's Party", the Sanskrit name for India) came to power in 2014 under its leader Narendra Modi. In Parliament today, the Congress peaks at 52 seats, while the BJP leads with more than 300 seats out of a total of 543 seats. Considered responsible for the decline of his party of which he had become the president, Rahul Gandhi chose to hand over after the 2019 elections, while remaining the embodiment of the party in a way. The success of the "March for Unity", whose objective was to denounce the partisan ideology of the government, accused of exacerbating the country's division between its Hindu majority and its religious minorities, helped to enhance the image of the Congress.

Rahul Gandhi's stature has also changed...

Indeed. For a long time, this son, grandson and great-grandson of prime ministers was criticized for not taking his political task seriously enough. In short, he was accused of playing politics as a dilettante. After the success of his march, his image improved. Especially since he has multiplied the frontal criticism of the government in Parliament and outside Parliament. Just recently, invited to speak at Cambridge University, his alma mater, he gave a speech highly critical of the policies of the Modi government, denouncing its repeated attacks on the fundamental structures of Indian democracy, to use the spirit of his words. The BJP cried foul. He accused him of attacking India, of discrediting his country abroad, especially in England, the former colonial power. The latest episode: the work of the Indian Parliament was virtually blocked for several days, when the speaker of the lower house systematically rejected the request of the opposition led by Rahul Gandhi that a parliamentary commission could be created to investigate the links between Narendra Modi and the industrialist Gautam Adani. Rahul Gandhi is now paying the price for his freedom of speech. However, we can question the effectiveness of this strategy, especially in a country like India where all the great leaders, from Mahatma Gandhi to Jawaharlal Nehru, have gone through prison. Under these conditions, it is not at all certain that a possible imprisonment of Rahul Gandhi will have a negative effect on his image among the population. And the government knows it.

You mentioned two hypotheses. What would be the second one?

According to some Indian analysts, the ruling party would not be unhappy to see its campaign for the 2024 legislative elections crystallize around a conflict of people, in this case between Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi, rather than around two programs and a review of the two mandates of the government. The BJP's repeated attacks on the emblematic figure of the Congress set him up as a leader of the opposition, while seeking to neutralize him by denouncing what the government calls the arrogance of the Gandhi dynasty, and the alleged anti-patriotism of Rahul, accusations that may resonate with the part of the electorate sensitive to Hindu nationalist discourse and the image of a strong man. from the people, which Narendra Modi cultivates. This strategy is nevertheless risky for the ruling party, which fears that opposition parties will mobilize around the person of Rahul Gandhi if he were to be imprisoned, thus becoming the symbol of the muzzling of critics and criticisms by an authoritarian power.

Precisely, did the ouster of Rahul Gandhi lead the opposition parties to mobilize around Rahul Gandhi?

After the announcement of the exclusion of Rahul Gandhi from Parliament, there were indeed favorable reactions to the Congress among the leaders of the opposition accusing the government of wanting to instrumentalize justice. In their speeches, some opponents described the court's decision sentencing the congressman to two years' imprisonment as an "unconstitutional" decision or at least outside the normal framework of responses to remarks deemed defamatory made in the heat of an election campaign. But at the same time we are far from having a unanimous vote of the opponents on the way forward. The government of Tamil Nadu in the south renewed its support for the Congress party, as did the head of the government of Bihar in the north, while the Ordinary Man's Party, the "Aam Admi Party" which rules the states of New Delhi and Punjab, protested against the removal of Rahul Gandhi from Parliament. but will not necessarily go so far as to accept an alliance of the entire opposition that would place itself under the tutelage of Congress. On another line, Mamata Banerjee, the powerful head of the Bengal government, had been making a speech for weeks "neither BJP nor Congress" trying to win the support of some regional leaders. Interestingly, however, we saw the elected representatives of his party, when Parliament resumed on March 31, clearly join the protest movements accusing the Modi government of "destroying democracy and subverting institutions". One can think that the Modi government conducted its analysis in this regard to assess the risks of crystallizing the opposition against it. His bet is that whatever happens to Rahul Gandhi, the main opposition parties do not want Congress to find itself in a leading position in a possible coalition of opponents of Narendra Modi.

Should we expect a strong Western reaction to this new blow to Indian democracy?

India is preparing for the G20 summit to be held in September. If New Delhi feared a strong Western reaction, it would not have taken the decision to have a leading opposition figure sentenced to imprisonment. The Indian government considers that it has room for maneuver and moreover India's participation in the summit of democracies initiated by Joe Biden, which was held last week, reinforces its calculation. The invitation issued by Emmanuel Macron to Narendra Modi for the celebration of July 14, 2023, the year marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Franco-Indian strategic partnership, goes in the same direction, without yet knowing New Delhi's response to the invitation, the diplomatic calendar of the Indian Prime Minister being particularly busy. Admittedly, a number of American bodies, close to parliamentary circles or independent have declared to follow closely the evolution of Indian democracy, but in the official American discourse as well as among the allies, realpolitik and geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific vis-à-vis China, India remains "the largest democracy in the world". ». This was repeated by the new Australian Prime Minister who was in the Indian capital in March. The Modi government knows, however, that American officials are questioning India's democratic evolution, but the stakes of foreign policy and the great questions about world order and disorder make New Delhi feel quite comforted, certainly not in its oppressive line it has adopted on Rahul Gandhi, but on the place it can occupy in American strategy. even on the world stage.

* Jean-Luc Racine is Emeritus Research Director at the CNRS (Centre d'études de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud, EHESS) and senior researcher at Asia Centre. His current research focuses on three themes:

- the internal dynamics of contemporary India,

- the strategies by which India is redefining its position in Asia and on the global stage,

- the geopolitics of South Asia, in particular India-Pakistan relations, Pakistan's regional policy and the evolution of Afghanistan, including their Chinese dimensions.

Newsletter Receive all the international news directly in your mailbox

I subscribe

Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application

Read on on the same topics:

  • India
  • Rahul Gandhi
  • Our selection