Rahul holds the trump card

Rajesh Ramachandran

ONE keeps hearing about fast-track courts all the time, but not many recent trials seem to have had a faster track than the criminal defamation suit against Congress leader Rahul Gandhi. The trial courts all over the country have a lot to learn from the Chief Judicial Magistrate’s court of Surat on how to conduct a quick trial and award the maximum sentence. If the trial itself elicited so much interest over its speed, the sentencing led to an even faster ouster from the Lok Sabha owing to the automatic disqualification rule, whose amendment Rahul himself had torn up when he was still the young entitled son of the Prime Minister’s boss.

It doesn’t behove the Lok Sabha secretariat to issue an eviction notice to a freshly disqualified MP over sentencing by a trial court, when no judicial remedy has been exhausted.

The superfast processes of getting the country’s biggest Opposition leader thrown out of the Lok Sabha has drawn a lot of flak from the West, specifically from the US State Department and the German government spokesperson. Does the Surat court order — whose English translation one has not accessed yet — mean that every Modi can get aggrieved if some Modis are attacked somewhere? So, if a Punjabi Nayar is poked, should a Malayali Nayar respond? For, Bihar’s former deputy CM Sushil Modi also wants to get Rahul punished by a Patna court for the same offence! Defamation cases filed all across the country by political opponents over political speeches are actually a curb on free speech, particularly when the allegations are purely political.

Worse, it does not behove the Lok Sabha secretariat to issue an eviction notice to a freshly disqualified Member of Parliament over the sentencing by a trial court, when not a single judicial remedy has been exhausted. It sounds like the arrogant slamming of the door by a new occupant on the face of an older resident. However, now the Central Government is showing signs of nervousness over Rahul not moving a higher court against the verdict even after a week. The Surat court’s order sentencing Rahul to two years in jail, the Lok Sabha Speaker’s decision to disqualify him immediately, the secretariat’s notice to get him evicted — all have sort of added to Rahul’s own lament that he was not allowed to speak in Parliament.

Rahul’s comments abroad — as well as his attack on people with the Modi surname — cannot be justified. No right-thinking person will agree with Rahul on his claims that Sikhs are second-class citizens in the country or that India is Ukraine. His assessment of Indian democracy should have been made closer home, not in a place where India is constantly undermined or to the legatees of those who had presided over genocidal famines, wars and communal conflagrations in the subcontinent. But then it is the logic of competitive politics that compels players to use every platform to deride one’s opponents and also to run down the system that their rivals control. All the non-Communist stalwarts opposed to Indira Gandhi had used similar platforms to great effect. Such attacks abroad may help anti-India forces to weaken the country’s resolve to have an independent foreign policy, but that obviously is not the Opposition leaders’ primary objective — it is to loosen the grip of the ruler over the system.

By not allowing Rahul to explain his statements made abroad in the Lok Sabha, the treasury benches have not brought any glory to the democratic system that they control. The raison d’etre of a Parliament is not to conduct government business, for which a multi-party democracy may not even be a prerequisite; a Parliament’s primary concern is to listen to the Opposition. Rahul has a lot of flaws as a Congress leader and as a parliamentarian. His attendance is merely 51%, whereas the national average is 79% and the Kerala MPs’ average is 84%; he has participated in just six debates against the national and state averages of 41.3 and 68.7, respectively; he has asked just 94 questions against the national and state averages of 170 and 225, respectively; and he has not introduced a single private member’s bill (all data from PRS Legislative Research website).

But these statistics should bother only the Congress party and the voters of Wayanad, not the government. As far as Parliament as the ultimate democratic forum is concerned, Rahul has every right to speak, particularly when the issue is all about him. Using the lung power of the treasury benches to shut him up is not a tactic that is going to win the voters’ confidence. In fact, the denial of this right to Rahul has only underscored his allegations about the weakening of Indian democratic institutions. Even Indira Gandhi, the strongest Indian PM ever, could not live down the charge of shutting up the Opposition. Of course, she had gone much further by locking up the entire Opposition and censoring the Press.

How will Indian voters respond to Rahul getting locked up for the defamatory comment? Come to think of it, won’t the people react the same way as they did against Indira? We, the argumentative Indians, cannot brook being shut up and, conversely, we revere a person who goes to jail for his right to speak out, particularly when it is to defame some scamster somewhere who is not being brought to book. It may backfire if the attempt is to play the OBC card during the Karnataka Assembly polls, simply because no OBC will be able to identify with Nirav Modi or Lalit Modi, who were the actual targets of Rahul’s attack. In fact, in the context of the allegations of crony capitalism over Adani, the government would be digging a deeper, inextricable hole for itself by getting associated with more and more scamsters.

Rahul, then, holds the trump card now. His obsession with a political ‘tapasya’ will get endorsed and the country’s electoral climate will get significantly altered if he surrenders before the Surat court and walks into the jail to suffer his sentence. But the question is: Does Rahul have it in him?

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