By Mayank Chhaya-
Rahul Gandhi’s expulsion from parliament is a stunning embarrassment for India’s democracy but has the potential to transform his national stature.
Gandhi’s suspiciously swift disqualification as a Member of Parliament in the aftermath of a court verdict in Surat, Gujarat, against him in a case of criminal defamation offers him a remarkable opportunity to cast himself as a morally lofty and politically wronged adversary to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
This, of course, does not extenuate his clubbing all those with the surname Modi, including the prime minister, as “thieves” in a transgressive allusion to Nirav Modi, once a prominent billionaire diamond merchant and now a fugitive facing charges of defrauding a bank of billions of rupees. The apparent intention was to paint the prime minister with the same brush.
With some imagination the 52-year-old Gandhi could leverage the expulsion, which would be likely revoked by a higher court, to give himself an aura of the most trenchantly vocal opponent of the prime minister and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), having been silenced as political vendetta.
On the face of it, the expulsion may seem like a serious setback to the opposition in parliament in the short-term but in the runup to the 2024 parliamentary elections it gives him a powerful battering ram.
Even though Gandhi’s arrest was stayed by the court giving him 30 days to appeal, the parliamentary secretariat peremptorily handed down his disqualification in 24 hours, an action being widely viewed as excessive and politically motivated.
Signaling the direction he would take, Gandhi tweeted soon after the expulsion, “I am fighting for the voice of India, I am ready to pay any cost.” Frequently derided as “Pappu”, a term that sort of means a an ineffectual wimp, Gandhi’s obvious success during his recently concluded 3500-kilometer walk across the country not only repaired that reputation but gave him an unprecedented national profile. His disqualification could lend itself well to a strategy where he is being cast by the Indian National Congress as the leader paying the price for being fiercely independent.
In some ways, the disqualification also strengthens his party’s narrative that Gandhi has risen so much in national consciousness since his cross-country walk for a united India that the BJP generally and Modi particularly have been shaken up. The result is that they would go to any length to head him off before the 2024 elections.
Gandhi, who has increasingly positioned himself as the only relentless critic of the Modi government at every step and level, may not have accepted his conviction and a two-year sentence but now that it is there, he is expected to weave it into his campaign as a striking example of his effectiveness.
It is clear that Gandhi and his party will fight all the way to the Supreme Court to vacate his conviction. It is not altogether inconceivable that it would be lifted much before it goes to the Supreme Court.
The expulsion months before the much-anticipated upcoming G20 summit on September 9 and 10 in New Delhi could be problematic especially when Prime Minister Modi has been regularly celebrating India’s democracy and projecting himself as its strongest champion. Although there is no clearly discernible straight line from the criminal defamation case to the prime minister, the fact that Purnesh Modi, a BJP member of Gujarat’s legislative assembly and a former minister, filed the original criminal defamation case does tell an instructive story. Purnesh Modi pursued the case for nearly four years.
On a separate but related note, it is profoundly ironic that in September, 2013, as Congress vice president Gandhi had torn up a copy of an ordinance that his own party’s government under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had brought to protect politicians convicted in criminal cases. Had that ordinance been issued, Gandhi would not have faced the consequence he is facing today.
