HYDERABAD (The Thursday Times) — Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition in India’s Lok Sabha, said on Saturday that India is “no longer a democracy” and questioned how any election could be legitimate after a revision of voter rolls that he said had struck off 140 million voters. The BJP accused him of seeking “regime change” with foreign help.
Gandhi was speaking at the closing session of the two-day Bharat Summit, hosted by the Congress-run Telangana government at the Hyderabad International Convention Centre.
“It is important for the democratic movement on the planet that India remains a democracy, and what we have found and proven is that India is actually no longer a democracy,” he said.
He said the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls had left 140 million voters either non-existent or ineligible, among them people who had voted in the 2024 general election, and asked how a vote could be called fair if that many voters were declared invalid. He also pointed to the Maharashtra assembly election, saying seven million new voters had been added in the three months after the general election and that all of them had voted for the BJP.
“What we discovered, and we have proven without any doubt, is that democracy was destroyed in India in 2014,” he said, referring to the year Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP came to power.
Gandhi also accused Modi of having grown too close to the industrialist Gautam Adani, and said the BJP’s assets had grown elevenfold in a decade, making it hard for other parties to compete. He said the opposition had found its footing again by going directly to voters, and that defeating Modi was “already a done deal”.
Barred delegates
Gandhi apologised to foreign delegates who could not attend, saying the federal government had kept them out. It gives a sense of what “we are dealing with in India,” he said.
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said on Friday that 115 of the 315 speakers cleared by the Ministry of External Affairs had later been refused entry or had their visas cancelled. Among those kept away was the Norwegian journalist Helle Lyng, who says India cancelled her visa after she questioned Modi about press freedom in Oslo in May. The ministry’s spokesperson, Randhir Jaiswal, has said that visa decisions are a sovereign function of every country.
‘Puppet of foreign powers’
BJP spokesperson Pradeep Bhandari called Gandhi a “puppet of foreign powers”. “Rahul Gandhi wants regime change with foreign help,” he said.
The party’s national media convenor, Ashish Usha Agarwal, questioned the invitation to Guillaume Long, a former foreign minister of Ecuador and a senior fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington think tank that he said had received grants from the George Soros-backed Open Society Policy Center. “By inviting individuals like Guillaume Long, is Rahul Gandhi seeking international backing for an anti-India agenda?” he wrote on X.
BJP Rajya Sabha MP Sudhanshu Trivedi also questioned the presence of Salil Shetty, a former secretary general of Amnesty International, citing remarks Shetty made about Kashmir in 2019.
In Hyderabad, police placed the Telangana BJP president, N Ramchander Rao, under house arrest at his home while the summit was under way. Rao accused the Congress government of suppressing dissent while preaching democracy. Members of the BJP’s youth wing, the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, protested near the venue and tore down Gandhi’s posters, and police detained several of them.
Telangana Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy, whose government hosted the summit, urged people to stand behind Gandhi against what he called autocratic rule. Earlier on Saturday, Gandhi launched a social security and welfare scheme for gig workers in the state and joined delivery riders on a motorcycle rally through the city.
The speech came a day after Gandhi accused Modi of tapping his phone, a charge the BJP called baseless.
