Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Saturday lambasted a journalist for asking a question in matter related to the Surat court’s judgement over the ‘Modi surname’ remark. Gandhi was addressing a press conference for the first time after he was disqualified as a Lok Sabha member on March 24.
Also read: Rahul Gandhi presser: 10 things Cong leader said about Adani, disqualification
The journalist was asking a question in connection with the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) claim that Gandhi’s remark against the Modi surname is an ‘insult to the OBC (other backward classes) community’. To this, the Congress leader confronted the journalist that he is ‘directly working of the BJP’ and suggested to ‘show some discretion’.
“If you want to work for the BJP then put a BJP badge on your chest. Then I’ll answer to you the same way I answered them (other journalists). Don’t pretend to be a pressman,” Gandhi told the journalist.
During the address, Gandhi said that he does not care if he gets disqualified permanently from the Lok Sabha and claimed that he has been disqualified because ‘Prime Minister is scared of my next speech on Adani’. “I have seen it in his eyes,” he added, claiming the recent development came as a result of his retribution to his demand for a probe into the Adani-Hindenburg issue.
Taking a swipe at the Hindutva ideologue V D Savarkar, the Congress leader said that ‘Gandhis don’t apologise to anyone’, drawing parallel to his earlier claim that Savarkar had helped the British government during the freedom struggle and that he had written mercy petitions to be freed from the Andaman cellular jail.
The Congress leader was disqualified after a local court in Gujarat convicted him for two-year jail term over a remark he made against Modi surnames in Karnataka ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
The Lok Sabha secretariat said in a notification that he has been disqualified from the day of the conviction under the Constitution’s Article 102(1)(e) read with Section 8 of the Representation of the People Act.
