New Delhi: Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, on Tuesday accused the Chief Election Commissioner of hiding from elected representatives and said what had been done to the country amounted to treason, from which “nobody is going to escape.”
Addressing reporters during an Opposition protest against the Election Commission in the capital, Gandhi said nearly 300 Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha MPs had come earlier in the day to meet Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and his two colleagues. Police stopped them short of the Commission headquarters. “We are the representatives of the country… we represent the voice of the country. I do not know why 300 MPs were stopped here and then made to sit here. The Election Commission is 50 yards away. They are not letting us go. I do not understand what the problem is,” he said.
He said the Commission’s job was to conduct elections properly. “Three hundred MPs want to meet Gyanesh Kumar, and Gyanesh Kumar is scared. I do not know what is happening in the country. If representatives cannot meet the Election Commission, then what is the meaning of democracy?”
Asked how the Opposition would counter the ruling side, Gandhi replied: “We are not only countering them, we are going to destroy them. Maybe you are not watching what is going on.” Pressed on how long the MPs would remain at the site, he said he had no interest in what the BJP said. “I am standing here to save the democracy of India. A few hours ago, 300 Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha MPs came with me. They too are trying to save democracy in the country.”
Gandhi named Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat and Gyanesh Kumar, and said they had finished democracy in the country. “The whole country believes this. The youth of the country believe and understand this. Even the policemen who were stopping me here are saying they know. So the reality is known,” he said.
He alleged that Modi had hijacked the country through vote theft, that Shah and Bhagwat had done the same, and that Kumar had helped them. “Look, all of them… I am saying this after thinking it through, listen carefully… there will be action against every one of them. You will see, not one person among them will escape — whether it is Narendra Modi, Amit Shah, Gyanesh Kumar or Mohan Bhagwat.”
Closing in English, he said: “What has been done to my country, to our country, is called treason. Nobody is going to escape.”
The remarks came after Opposition MPs, marching from Parliament towards Nirvachan Sadan over the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls and their demand for Kumar’s resignation, were stopped by police and staged a sit-in a short distance from the Commission. Gandhi had earlier posted that it was “done” and time for the CEC to resign. The charges of vote theft and institutional capture remain the Opposition’s allegations; the government and the Commission have rejected them.
