BJP, Nishikant Dubey’s attempts to silence Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi shrink the House

The first half of the Budget session was not marked by rigorous debate or enlivened by sparkling parliamentary exchanges. It showcased, instead, a concerted — and disquieting — bid to silence the Leader of the Opposition. First, the Speaker and senior ministers prevented Rahul Gandhi from completing his reply to the motion of thanks on the President’s address. Gandhi attempted to read out from the unpublished memoirs of a former Army chief, and the Speaker and Treasury benches insisted that the rulebook did not allow him to do so. The targeting of the LoP was unparliamentary. Then, late last week, BJP MP Nishikant Dubey introduced a “substantive motion” against LoP Gandhi, for being “hand in glove” with “anti-national forces”, seeking the cancellation of his LS membership, and asking that he be debarred from contesting elections.

Dubey’s motion cannot be dismissed as that of an individual MP who has patented a provocative and polarising brand of politics. A substantive motion has been used in the past to suspend or disqualify MPs for criminal conduct, as in the aftermath of the “cash for votes” scandal in 2005. Rahul Gandhi’s criticism of the interim India-US trade deal, on the other hand, is a legitimate questioning of the government. Dubey paints Gandhi’s dissent as part of a conspiracy to “destabilise” India. This conflation of disagreement with being “anti-national”, this equating of political opponents with enemies, is part of a disturbing trend that shrinks spaces for debate, both inside and outside the House.

The position — and voice — of the LoP is crucial in a parliamentary democracy. MP Dubey, and the Treasury benches, have every right to object to the tone and content of Gandhi’s speeches in the House. Seeking his disqualification, however, reeks of intolerance. This is not the first such move — Rahul Gandhi was disqualified with unseemly alacrity in March 2023, following a conviction in a defamation case by a lower court; he was reinstated after the SC stayed the sentence in August 2023. Both then and now, the ruling party undermines itself, and diminishes the House, by being seen to use its considerable firepower to silence the LoP.