Rahul Gandhi, back in the 2019 election campaign, while taking a potshot at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, said: “How come all the thieves have Modi as the common surname?” Now that the Surat court has ensconced the issue, finding Rahul Gandhi guilty and punishing him with two years in jail, chief judicial magistrate HH Verma, on the other hand, authorised Gandhi’s release on a bond of Rs 15,000 and granted him a 30-day stay of execution to allow him to appeal. The moot point doesn’t remain the legality of what he said and whom he ended up affronting. In Gandhi’s case, at the request of his legal team, the Surat court deferred his sentence for 30 days to allow him to appeal the verdict, although the alacrity of the Congress with its battery of high-key lawyers — who knock off the doors of the apex court at midnight for even terrorists — seems to fizzle out in approaching the higher appellate court.
As a matter of fact, Rahul was suspended from the Lok Sabha the next day, in line with Section 8(3) of the Representation of People’s Act, which was undisputedly upheld in Lily Thomas (along with Lok Prahari) v. Union of India, wherein the Supreme Court ruled on July 10, 2013, that “any Member of Parliament (MP), Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA), or Member of a Legislative Council (MLC) who is convicted of a crime and given a minimum of two years imprisonment loses membership of the House with immediate effect. This is in contrast to the earlier position, wherein convicted members held on to their seats until they exhausted all judicial remedies in the lower, state, and Supreme Courts of India. Further, Section 8(4) of the Representation of the People Act, which allowed elected representatives three months to appeal their conviction, was declared ultra-vires (unconstitutional) by the bench of Justice AK Patnaik and Justice SK Mukhopadhaya,” notes Wikipedia.
The slew of events that followed the Rahul fiasco created a bedlam where a myriad of responses was witnessed not only in the Opposition camp but also in the Congressional quarters. Rajya Sabha member and senior congress leader Pramod Tiwari proposed that when sentencing a case, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi and his family’s background be considered and that the law should be different for the Gandhi family. This indeed reminds us of Dev Kant Barooah’s declaration, “Indira is India, India is Indira.”
As per Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, Rahul Gandhi himself tore the ordinance introduced by the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in 2013 to ensure that elected representatives convicted by a court do not face automatic disqualification. “Karma caught up to him,” he jibed. “I have been disqualified as the prime minister is scared of my next speech. I have seen fear in his eyes. That’s why they don’t want me to speak in the Parliament,” remarked the former MP Rahul in his presser. He disdainfully added, “My name is not Savarkar. I am a Gandhi. I won’t apologise.”
Let’s come back to addressing the elephant in the room, the purported unity of the Opposition. The issue seems to have huddled and mobilised the Opposition parties in alignment with the Congress, or so it seems! Leaders from various political parties like the Samajwadi Party (SP), the Trinamool Congress (TMC), the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) expressed solidarity and support with Rahul.
Interestingly, earlier this month, the TMC accused the Congress-Left combine of having an ‘immoral alliance’ with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and said that the party will not enter into any partnership with the two Opposition parties to fight the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. It even slammed the Congress over its alleged “big boss attitude” and that it did not respect the space of regional parties who were strong in their states, which attracted flak from Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, who, in turn, deemed TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee the creation of the Congress and alleged that the TMC that Mamata created became a party of thieves. While Akhilesh Yadav seemed to have supported Rahul, in a few hours, he pontificated to the Congress to support and promote the regional parties. AAP supremo and Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal tweeted in unmistakably harsh language against PM Modi and in support of Rahul Gandhi, but the two parties, i.e. the AAP and the INC, are at each other’s throats. This month, when the Enforcement Directorate (ED) apprehended the former Delhi Deputy CM, Manish Sisodia, Congress leaders wholeheartedly welcomed the move.
Back in 2018, a galaxy of bigheads of the anti-Modi camp, the likes of Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Akhilesh Yadav, Mayawati, Sitaram Yechuri, Mamata Banerjee, N Chandrababu Naidu, Sharad Pawar, Pinarayi Vijayan, Arvind Kejriwal, Sharad Yadav, Ajit Jogi, D Raja, Tejaswi Yadav, Puducherry CM V Narayanasamy, etc, posed in a show of “Opposition unity” but that was a fleeting moment to be cherished with the picturesque pose holding and raising hands, all in unison.
Be that as it may, the consistency and coherency of the Opposition is quite daunting and flummoxing to any political observer such as the writer of this article. This paucity of an ideological plank or a common minimum programme to lock horns with the Modi juggernaut needs to be designed if the Congress aims to vanquish the Modi-led BJP electorally.
Yuvraj Pokharna is an independent journalist and columnist. He tweets with @pokharnaprince. Views expressed are personal.
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