‘Indian democracy under attack for 10 years; now fighting back,’ says LoP Rahul Gandhi in US

Leader of Opposition (LoP) in Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi has alleged that democracy in India that was broken for the last ten years is now fighting back.

Gandhi, the Congress Member of Parliament (MP), made these remarks while talking to reporters at a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington DC during his three-day trip to the United States of America. Gandhi was, perhaps, referring to the first two terms of Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government at the Centre.

“I have seen the government of Maharashtra just being taken away from us. I've seen it with my own eyes. I've watched it, as our legislators have been bought in and hooked off and suddenly became BJP legislators. So Indian democracy has been under attack, has been very badly weakened, and now it's fighting back. And I'm confident that it'll fight back,” said the Raebareli MP.

“If you see the election results, does it give you more hope for a democracy in India?” Gandhi was asked.

“Yeah, I mean, it does. But it's not good enough to say that the Indian voter is resilient and knowledgeable. Because the Indian voter is informed by a whole set of structures. So if we don't have a level playing field, the voter might be very knowledgeable and resilient. It doesn't really matter,” he said.

In Lok Sabha Election 2024 results, declared on June 4, however, revealed otherwise, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) failed to get majority, and ended up winning 240 seats. PM Modi returned as Prime Minister with the support of allies in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). The Congress jumped to 99 seats, with the Opposition INDIA bloc bagging 293 seats, thus weakening BJP's claims.

“We fought an election with our bank accounts frozen. I don't know any democracy where that's happened. Maybe that type of thing happened in Syria or used to happen in Iraq. But we literally sat during our election and spoke to our treasurer and he says, well, we have no money. Now, you can have a resilient voter. You still need to run campaigns. You still need to have conversations. You still need to have meetings,” Gandhi said at the National Press Club.

“I've got 20-plus cases in me. I'm the only person in Indian history to get a prison sentence for defamation. We have a chief minister who's in jail (Arvind Kejriwal) right now. So, mean, one way of saying it is, yes, the Indian voter is very resilient, and he stands like a rock. Absolutely, he does. But the Indian voter requires an architecture to work on, which is not there,” Gandhi said.

Gandhi who is on a four-day tour of US continued with his attacks against Prime Minister Modi. “Here's a prime minister of a modern country in the 21st century telling people that I speak to God. I'm different than everybody else. You are biological people. I'm a non-biological person. I have a direct link to God. And that for us was a game over (for the prime minister during the elections). We knew that we had defeated the prime minister," he said.

"And then the beautiful thing was the first thing he did when he walked into the Lok Sabha, he was sworn in. He took the Constitution of India, and he placed it in his head,” he added.

“So, it was an interesting paradox. On one hand, he's destroying the Constitution. He's attacking the democratic structure. And then the Indian people have forced him to put it in his head,” Gandhi said.

(With PTI inputs)