Rahul Gandhi on Lok Sabha disqualification; Congress launches 'Jan Andolan' campaign

• Rahul Gandhi will hold a press conference on Saturday in the wake of his disqualification as a member of the Lok Sabha after being convicted in a defamation case over his “Modi surname” remarks
• The Congress leader is scheduled to hold the address around 1 PM and is likely to attack Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP over the court verdict
• Earlier on Friday, a notification was issued by the Lok Sabha Secretariat notifying Gandhi’s disqualification as the Member of Parliament from the Wayanad constituency in Kerala

Rahul Gandhi will hold a press conference on Saturday in the wake of his disqualification as a member of the Lok Sabha after being convicted in a defamation case over his “Modi surname” remarks made ahead of the 2019 General Elections.

The Congress leader is scheduled to hold the address around 1 PM and is likely to attack Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP over the court verdict and his subsequent disqualification from the Parliament membership on Friday, similar to what his party is doing after the development.

Earlier on Friday, a notification was issued by the Lok Sabha Secretariat notifying Gandhi’s disqualification as the Member of Parliament from the Wayanad constituency in Kerala. The Congress has announced a nationwide agitation from Monday, claiming that their leader has been deliberately disqualified for raising his voice against the Modi government.

This was decided at a Congress meeting at the party’s headquarters in Delhi, hours after Rahul’s disqualification. The meeting was attended by senior leaders such as party president Mallikarjun Kharge, Sonia Gandhi, general secretaries Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, K C Venugopal, Jairam Ramesh, Rajiv Shukla and Tariq Anwar along others.

Reacting to the termination of his Parliament membership, Rahul said that he is fighting for the voice of the country and is ready to pay any price for that.

Addressing the media after the Congress meeting, senior leader Jairam Ramesh said, “we will go all over the country as Rahul Gandhi was deliberately disqualified for raising his voice against the Modi government on the Adani issue, on the government’s foreign policy and the clean chit given to China for incursions at the border”. He said that the Congress welcomes statements of all the opposition leaders that were made in support of Rahul Gandhi. “There was a consensus that we should now take the job of building opposition unity in a systematic way. Now the coordination has to be outside parliament,” he added.

Echoing similar sentiments, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra said that the BJP-led government is scared of the questions being posed to it and the disqualification has been done as a part of planning to make sure Rahul Gandhi doesn’t stay in Parliament. “We have the blood of martyrs in our veins, who have shed for this country – we will fight hard, we are not afraid. (The) Government does not want to answer Rahul Gandhi’s Adani-Modi relationship and the action against him is the result of that,” she said.

Rahul Gandhi was held guilty under the Section 504 (provocation to provoke breach of peace) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). The court, however, later granted him bail and gave him 30 days to appeal against the order.