Will pay any price for the voice of India

In the first public comments on his disqualification as a lawmaker, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi today said he would pay any price to protect the voice of India.

"I am fighting for the voice of India. I am ready to pay any cost," Rahul said in a Twitter post following the Lok Sabha Secretariat notification announcing his disqualification following his conviction by a Surat court in a 2019 criminal defamation case, reports our New Delhi correspondent.

Modi's government has been widely accused of using the law to target and silence critics, and the case in the premier's home state of Gujarat is one of several lodged against his chief opponent in recent years.

Gandhi, of the opposition Congress party, was sentenced to two years imprisonment but walked free on bail after his lawyers vowed to appeal Thursday's verdict.

However, the conviction has ruled him ineligible to continue sitting as a lawmaker in the lower house of the Indian parliament, a notice from the chamber's joint secretary said.

"Rahul Gandhi has been speaking out fearlessly inside and outside the parliament... clearly he is paying a price for it," Congress spokesman Abhishek Manu Singhvi told reporters.

"It signifies the systematic, repetitive emasculation of democratic institutions by the ruling party. It signifies the strangulation of democracy itself."

Rahul's sister and Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra said her brother, the son of a martyred prime minister, was called 'Mir Jafar' and insults were hurled at his family. But he would not bow down as he belongs to a family whose members have nurtured democracy by its blood, she added.

In a series of tweets, Priyanka Gandhi launched an all-out attack on Modi, saying in a tweet in Hindi, "Narendra Modi ji, your sycophants called the son of a martyred prime Minister a traitor, Mir Jafar. One of your Chief Minister raised questions as to who is the father of Rahul Gandhi? … Insulting the whole family and the Kashmiri Pandit community, you asked in Parliament why we don't keep the name Nehru. But no judge gave you a sentence of two years. Did not disqualify you from the Parliament," she said.

Rahul Gandhi is the scion of India's most famous political dynasty and the son, grandson and great-grandson of former prime ministers, beginning with independence leader Jawaharlal Nehru.

But he has struggled to challenge the electoral juggernaut of Modi's party and its nationalist appeals to the country's Hindu majority.

Thursday's case stemmed from a remark made during the 2019 election campaign in which Gandhi had asked why "all thieves have Modi as (their) common surname".

His comments were seen as a slur against the prime minister, who went on to win the election in a landslide.

Members of the government also said the remark was a smear against all those sharing the Modi surname, which is associated with the lower rungs of India's traditional caste hierarchy.

Ravi Shankar Prasad, a spokesman for Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), told reporters after Thursday's verdict that the court had acted with "due judicial process".

But Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, a New Delhi-based writer and analyst, told AFP that the conviction showed the BJP "does not want Rahul Gandhi in parliament".

He said the disqualification followed a "big storm" of disruptions to parliamentary proceedings by Congress lawmakers demanding a probe into Modi's relationship with tycoon Gautam Adani.

The two men have been close associates for decades but Adani's business empire has been subject to renewed scrutiny this year after a US investment firm accused it of "brazen" corporate fraud.

Several senior lawmakers have been disqualified from Indian legislatures in the past, including a state chief minister.

Indira Gandhi, Rahul's grandmother, was briefly forced out of the chamber by a court decision in 1977 while she was prime minister.

But legal action has been widely deployed against opposition party figures and institutions seen as critical of the Modi government in recent years.