New Delhi: Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Sunday trained her guns on the ruling BJP and vowed to keep fighting for the people at the party’s Sankalap Satyagraha to protest against the move to disqualify her brother and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi.
“Who thinks that they can silence us by scaring and humiliating us? Listen, we will not stop, I will see to it that the hard-earned money of the public is not being looted and given to few people,” Priyanka Gandhi said in a hard-hitting attack on the ruling party at the Centre.
“It was my family (Nehru-Gandhi) who nurtured the democracy of this country with their blood,” she said.
Rahul Gandhi, on Friday, was disqualified as a member of the Lok Sabha, a day after a Surat court sentenced him to two years imprisonment in a defamation case filed against him over his ‘Modi surname’ remark.
The decision came pertaining to his remark made in April 2019, where he had said “how come all the thieves have Modi as the common surname” at a Lok Sabha election rally at Kolar in Karnataka. The court approved Gandhi’s bail on a surety and stayed the sentence for 30 days to allow him to approach the higher courts.
“My brother went to PM Modi and hugged him in Parliament and said he has no hatred for you. We might have different ideologies but we do not have the ideology of hatred,” the Congress General Secretary said at Raj Ghat.
Referring to Rahul Gandhi’s disqualification, the Congress leader said that such people are not disqualified from the Parliament.
“They are not sent to jail, and they are not stopped from contesting elections for years. They have insulted my family a lot of times, but we kept quiet,” she said.
“My father’s dead body was under this tricolour, and my brother was following him, you insult that martyr in the Parliament. You call the martyr’s son Mir Jafar, you point fingers at the Nehru family. You insult the Kashmiri tradition where a son uses his father’s surname,” Gandhi said.
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) national spokesperson Sambit Patra on Tuesday hit out at Congress MP Rahul Gandhi and compared him to the present-day Mir Jafar of Indian polity and said that he has to apologise for his remarks in the UK.
In February, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took a dig at the Nehru-Gandhi family over a large number of schemes named after its members and asked why they are “scared of keeping the Nehru surname”.
‘We’ll not stop protests until Rahul Gandhi returns as MP’
Protesting against the disqualification of Rahul Gandhi as Lok Sabha MP, Wayanad District Congress Committee (DCC) chief ND Appachan said that they will not stop protests until Rahul Gandhi returns as MP.
Rahul Gandhi was a former MP from Wayanad.
DCC of Wayanad has organised a Satyagraha in the district, against Rahul Gandhi’s disqualification as MP.
“We will not stop the protests until Rahul Gandhi returns as MP”, said Congress’ Wayanad leader ND Appachan.
“The situation that destroys democracy should be changed. The people of Wayanad will not be silent until he returns as MP. That’s for sure. We will make any sacrifice,” Appachan added.
Meanwhile, Leader of the Opposition in Kerala, VD Satheesan said that the action against Rahul Gandhi was “hasty and politically motivated”.
Satheesan said: “The decision of the Surat court is not final. Congress believes in democracy and rule of law. The country has a legal system that extends up to the Supreme Court. Rahul Gandhi will come back through the legal route. Neither Rahul nor Congress can be silenced by this. We will still raise our voice for democracy and secular values.”
