Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Mar 4: The BJP sharpened its attack on the former Congress president Rahul Gandhi for allegedly defaming India and the Narendra Modi government on the foreign soil when he told a gathering in Cambridge University earlier this week that democracy in India was under threat and the judiciary and the media were under attack.
While the BJP spokesman Sambit Patra launched a forthright attack on Gandhi for “making such allegations about the conditions in the country which even Pakistan does not dare to do,” the union law minister Kiren Rijiju at a function in Bhubaneswar without naming Gandhi castigated the “calibrated attempts to tell the World that Indian judicial was under attack and Indian democracy was in distress.”
“I find that there are calibrated attempts being made from inside and outside the country. I have never even a single person of India who says that he will not abide by Indian laws or I have never come across anybody in the country that he will say that he would not follow the court Order,” said Mr. Rijiju while addressing, ‘Nyaya-Yajna,’ the first conference of Central government counsel of Eastern States of India.
“Despite that attempts are being made to tell the story that Indian Judiciary is under attack. There are attempts being made to speak in forum inside India and outside India that Indian judiciary is in crisis. The message which is being sent is that Indian democracy is in crisis,” said Union Law Minister.
“No campaign whatsoever with ulterior motives can succeed in defaming India and its democratic set-ups. We Indian are inherently democratic. That’s why we proudly claim that we are mother of democracy in the world. United States can say that they are the oldest democracy, but India is truly the mother of democracy,” he pointed out.
Emphasising on need of stringent laws, Mr. Rijiju said, “Our prime interest is to secure the nation. We have to make our society full of provisions which make it fully secured. Security does not just come like that. One has to sacrifice many things for coming to a shape. Even for a sportsperson or bodybuilder, one has to really sweat out and sacrifice to get a shape. In a similar fashion, to guarantee individual freedom, rights and liberty, we have to sacrifice many things.”
“When we want to make India safe and secured place, we have to make stringent laws. Without that the freedom will not exist. As long as we have a secured boundary and as long as we have strong State, all the things guaranteed in Constitution will prevail. Otherwise, there will be complete lawlessness. In the name of freedom, if everybody runs freely where will be the law and order and discipline in the society? We need to strike a balance,” he pointed out.
He criticised the “mischievous efforts to malign Indian judiciary and Indian State as a whole” and said such attempts must be resisted, not just by legal fraternity, but by every citizen. He lamented that some people want Indian judiciary to play the role of Opposition.
In Delhi, Sambit Patra comparing Rahul Gandhi as a friend of Pakistan, said while the whole world was using good words to describe India, its main opposition leader was claiming on foreign soil that the country has been destroyed and democracy is no longer there while the judiciary and the media are in a bad shape.
He accused Mr Gandhi of dissuading investors from investing in India at a time when the world is seeing the country as a “bright spot” and foreign firms are leaving China to do business here. “In a big university, he is telling people bad things about India. While even Pakistan no longer dares say these things about India on a global forum, Gandhi is presenting it as a place where democracy is no longer there and the judiciary has been compromised,” he said.
Mr Patra questioned if Gandhi was working as an agent on the payroll of an agency to bring down India. Pointing out that Gandhi spoke about minorities being treated as second-class citizens, Patra alleged, “Rahul Gandhi and the Gandhi family can stoop to any low to destroy the fabric of India.”
Mr Patra said Mr Gandhi or other Congress leaders did not even submit their mobile phones for inspection by a probe committee set by the Supreme Court to look into the charge of snooping through the Pegasus malware.
Hitting out at the previous Congress-led UPA government, he claimed that an RTI reply had revealed that thousands of phones were tapped and hundreds of emails read by government agencies when the UPA was in power and recalled that former president Pranab Mukherjee, then a Cabinet minister, had suspected that his office was bugged at the behest of another minister. He particularly slammed Gandhi for his remarks at a time when India was hosting the G20, with world leaders recognising the leadership of Modi.
Meanwhile, a magistrate court has fixed April 1 as the date for passing an order on an application by Rahul Gandhi seeking permanent exemption from appearing in ongoing defamation proceedings against him on a complaint filed by a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) leader.
Advocate Narayan Iyer had filed an application on behalf of Mr. Gandhi, seeking permanent exemption. He said, “The First Class Judicial Magistrate L.C. Wadikar will pass an order on April 1 in the application and proceed with the matter.”
On March 6, 2014, Mr. Gandhi had made a speech in Bhiwandi holding the RSS responsible for the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. He had said, “RSS people killed Gandhiji and today their people (Bharatiya Janata Party) talk of him…They opposed Sardar Patel and Gandhiji.” Soon thereafter, Rajesh Kunte, secretary of the Bhiwandi unit of the RSS, registered a First Information Report against Mr. Gandhi.
On December 6, 2018, Mr Gandhi had appeared before a local court in Bhiwandi and pleaded “not guilty” to the charges of Section 499 (defamation) and Section 500 (punishment for defamation) which can be a simple imprisonment for a term which may extend to two years, or with fine, or with both under the Indian Penal Code. Gandhi has been on bail since November 16, 2016 on the personal surety of Shivraj Patil who submitted land documents of a place in Latur.