Modi Doesn’t Need the Autocrat’s Playbook
If overzealous followers are behind the disqualification of opposition leader Rahul Gandhi, they are doing India’s popular prime minister no favors.
Asset or enemy?
Photographer: Money Sharma/AFP/Getty Images
For over a decade, supporters of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party have insisted that the party’s greatest asset is Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the opposition Indian National Congress. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is self-made, they argue, and comes across as deeply engaged with ordinary Indians’ problems. By contrast, Gandhi’s father, grandmother, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather all led the Congress Party. He has long been dismissed as a callow youth, unprepared for the leadership role thrust on him by virtue of his name.
So, if Gandhi is such an asset for the BJP, why has he just been thrown out of India’s Parliament? The move looks at first glance to have come straight out of the authoritarian playbook, with a strongman leader deploying the courts to silence and sideline a potentially dangerous rival.