Rahul Gandhi, the Congress leader, slammed a journalist on Saturday for asking a question about the Surat court’s decision on the ‘Modi surname’ remark. Gandhi was holding his first press conference since being disqualified as a Member of Parliment on March 24.
Rahul Gandhi, India’s opposition leader, speaks at a press conference after being expelled from parliament on Friday, a day after a court convicted him of defamation and sentenced him to two years in prison for mocking the surname Modi in an election speech.
The journalist was raising questions about the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) claim that Gandhi’s remark against Modi’s surname is a “insult to the OBC (other backward classes) community”. To this, the Congress leader confronted the journalist that he is ‘directly working for the BJP’ and suggested to ‘show some discretion’.
“If you want to work for the BJP then put a BJP badge on your chest. Then I’ll answer to you the same way I answered them (other journalists). Don’t pretend to be pressman,” Gandhi told the journalist.
During the address, Gandhi said that he does not care if he gets disqualified permanently for the Lok Sabha and claimed that he has been disqualified because ‘Prime Minister is scared of me if my next speech on Adani’. “I have seen it in his eyes,” he added, claiming the recent development came as a result of his retribution to his demand for a probe into the Adani-Hindenburg issue.
Rahul Gandhi, India’s opposition leader, speaks at a press conference after being expelled from parliament on Friday, a day after a court convicted him of defamation and sentenced him to two years in prison for mocking the surname Modi in an election speech.
Taking a swipe at the Hindutva ideologue V D Savarkar, the Congress leader said he said that ‘Gandhis don’t apologise to anyone’. Rahul Gandhi earlier claimed that Savarkar had helped the British government during the freedom struggle and said that he had written mercy petitions to be freed from the Andaman cellular jail.
The Congress leader was disqualified after a Gujarat court sentenced him to two years in prison for a remark he made about Modi surnames in Karnataka ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
According to the Lok Sabha secretariat, he has been disqualified from the day of his conviction under Article 102(1)(e) of the Constitution and Section 8 of the Representation of the People Act.