Scenes of chaos unfolded at the heart of India's capital this week as police set up barricades and roughed up hundreds of political workers and lawmakers protesting the expulsion of Rahul Gandhi from India's seat of democracy - its parliament.
Members of India's largest opposition party, the Congress, gathered in front of Delhi's iconic Red Fort to protest against the disqualification of Gandhi - an issue that has drawn rare and unanimous condemnation from a majority of the country's opposition parties.
Slogans calling for democracy to be protected rang in the air as did chants against prime minister Narendra Modi. Demonstrators sat in front of several police vehicles carrying detained party workers. "Jab jab Modi darta hai, police ko aagey karta hai (whenever Modi is afraid, he uses the police to crackdown on dissent)," shouted protesters as police used force to clear the way.
"This is not a fight for Rahul Gandhi. This is [a] fight for saving the Indian constitution," says Congress worker Mathura Prasad Khushwaha, while trying to reason with the police as they tried to detain him. "It will affect not just me. It will affect you and your children. We are fighting for their rights too," he says from the window of the police vehicle he was pushed into.
Gandhi lost his seat in the lower house of parliament last week after a court found him guilty of defamation over his remarks about the "Modi" surname. Indian parliamentary rules say a member loses their seat if they are convicted of a crime and sentenced to two or more years in prison.
"Why all the thieves, be it Nirav Modi, Lalit Modi or Narendra Modi, have Modi in their names?" Gandhi had said during a rally in the southern Karnataka state in 2019 while referring to a business tycoon, a former Indian Premier League chief, and the Indian prime minister respectively.
This story is from the April 01, 2023 edition of The Independent.
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This story is from the April 01, 2023 edition of The Independent.
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