India’s Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi has alleged that democracy in India for the last 10 years was broken, but now it is fighting back. Gandhi made these remarks on Tuesday while talking to reporters at a news conference in Washington, DC, at the National Press Club.
“I can say to you that Indian democracy for the last 10 years was broken. It’s fighting back, but it was broken,” Gandhi said. “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.”
Asked if the last election results give him more hope for a democracy in India, the Congress leader said, “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.
“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,” he said.
We fought an election with our bank accounts frozen. I don’t know of any democracy where that happens. During the election, our treasurer said we don’t have any money.
— Congress (@INCIndia) September 10, 2024
You can have vigilant voters, but you still need to run a campaign, hold conversations, and organise meetings.… pic.twitter.com/hlZM7AmlPn
“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 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 continued with his attacks against Prime Minister Narendra 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.
