Desk Report
Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi told the Rahul Gandhi Bharat Summit in Hyderabad on Saturday that India is “actually no longer a democracy”, alleging that voter-roll deletions after the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and the fusion of politics and big business had hollowed out Indian democracy — a charge the Bharatiya Janata Party rejected within hours, calling the event a “Bharat Badnaam Summit”.
Addressing the second edition of the Bharat Summit, a Congress-backed platform hosted by the Telangana government that drew delegates from 70 countries, Gandhi said the Opposition had spent a decade in shock after 2014 before understanding what he described as a fundamental change in Indian politics. “When we were faced with the most difficult test, and I can tell you already with confidence that we are going to defeat Mr. (Narendra) Modi, we are going to get rid of Mr Modi. And you can see it on our streets, you can see it in Delhi, and you can see it in the fear that the Prime Minister and (Home Minister) Amit Shah have. This is already a done deal,” he said, according to the Indian Express.
Rahul Gandhi Bharat Summit speech: “India is actually no longer a democracy”
Gandhi began his address by speaking of what he called a fascist turn in the world, and said that in 2014 India witnessed something it had never seen before. “A completely new election, something we have never seen before. Millions of dollars injected into the political system, a completely new mode of campaign. A drama such as we had never seen before. Electoral system which is used to close fights, coalitions were suddenly upturned,” he said. The Opposition, he added, was in shock “not for a year, not for two but for a decade”, before realising that “democracy was destroyed in India in 2014”.
He described Indian democracy as a global asset because of its size and complexity, and a global public good. “It’s important for the democratic movement of the planet to make India remain democratic. But what is indeed found and proven is that India is no longer a democracy,” he said. He added that the economic structure the country was proud of had collapsed. “It no longer works, and it will never work,” he said, arguing that the collapse had created a huge liquidity crisis that devastated the country’s political system.
The 140-million-voter question
At the heart of the Rahul Gandhi Bharat Summit address was his repeated claim about the electoral rolls. He said 140 million people who voted in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections were later “declared either non-existent voters or non-voters”. “The question arises, if the Election Commission can declare 13 percent of voters as illegal after the 2024 elections, how is that election possibly legitimate?” he asked.
He cited Maharashtra as his example. The Congress coalition had swept the Lok Sabha polls in the state, he said, but was decimated three months later in the Assembly elections. “We start looking into the details of what we would find. We find that we get the exact same votes in both the elections. But seven million new voters are magically added in three months, and everyone of those seven million voters vote for the BJP, and they win the election,” Gandhi alleged.
The Election Commission has not accepted Gandhi’s voter-roll claims, and on Saturday it filed a supplementary affidavit in the Supreme Court detailing further measures to ensure that voters wrongly left out of the draft electoral rolls — listed as “absent, shifted, dead or duplicate” — are brought back in. The affidavit was filed in the ongoing case over the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, which Gandhi also questioned in his speech, alleging that large numbers of voters were being added to and deleted from the rolls.
The Adani-Modi charge: “The line has evaporated”
Gandhi argued that the economic collapse had enabled the concentration of wealth and a growing convergence of political and business interests. “Today we have a businessman in this country; before the BJP came to power, he was the 600th richest man in the world. Some months ago, he became the second richest man in the world, by the fusion of politics and business,” he said, referring to industrialist Gautam Adani. “The line between business and politics, between Mr Adani and Mr Modi, has evaporated. It doesn’t exist anymore,” he said, adding that Adani had “captured” huge assets in the country even as the BJP’s assets had grown 11-fold in a decade.
He also spoke about the difficulties the Opposition faces in reaching people, pointing to what he described as the capture of institutions and the dominance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the media. “Prime Minister Narendra Modi occupies television 24×7, and the Opposition did not know what to do as institutions had been captured. Forty-five cases have been filed against me, and I have to travel across the country to attend to them,” he said.
Love, truth and non-violence: the Opposition’s answer
The Congress party’s counterattack, Gandhi said, was its connection with people through the walk from Kanyakumari to Kashmir — the Bharat Jodo Yatra. Recalling the yatra, he said his direct interactions with people during the journey had changed his understanding of the relevance of Gandhian principles, and shown him that people continued to believe in truth and non-violence even when many inside the Congress had seen them as outdated political tools.
“We had never really used it politically because we never needed it… We found the two political weapons that he used – Satya and Ahimsa. We realised that under the circumstances, these were the most powerful weapons that worked,” Gandhi said. “Lies, anger, hatred, violence, fear did not work. Love worked, truth worked, non-violence worked.”
He maintained that the forces he described as fascist could not be challenged through anger, hatred or attacks, but only through sustained engagement with ordinary people. “The world is divided into two sections of people – a small minority who believe they are God and the vast majority are curious,” he said. The small minority, he added, is “called fascists in politics” and tends to make a lot of noise, drowning out the listening majority. “Historically, the fascists jump out of the woodwork when systems and structures collapse,” he said.
BJP hits back at Rahul Gandhi Bharat Summit speech
The BJP’s response came swiftly. Party leader C.R. Kesavan, in a post on X, dubbed the two-day event the “Bharat Badnaam Summit”, alleging that Rahul Gandhi and other Congress leaders used the platform to malign India. “The Congress party-sponsored Bharat Summit was, in reality, a Bharat Badnaam Summit, where Rahul Gandhi and his cronies badmouthed our nation and our democracy in the most foul manner,” Kesavan said.
“Rahul Gandhi defamed India’s democratic process in front of handpicked foreign delegates, many of them with very dubious credentials,” he added. Kesavan demanded that the Congress come clean on the backgrounds of the foreign delegates and their alleged links with organisations associated with and funded by US billionaire George Soros. He also recalled Gandhi’s earlier remarks calling for foreign involvement in India’s internal affairs, including his statement, “It is not just an Indian battle.”
“Rahul Gandhi and his ecosystem’s sinister agenda to somehow destabilise Indian democracy with the aid of foreign powers will fail miserably and will boomerang back very badly on the compromised Congress party,” Kesavan said.
The visa row and the “vote thief” chant
The summit was shadowed by a row over visas. The Union government reportedly denied or revoked visas for more than 100 foreign invitees to the Bharat Summit, while granting clearance to over 300 others. Among those denied entry was Norwegian journalist Helle Lyng, who had briefly attracted attention during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Oslo in May after raising a question about press freedom with the Indian side. She was reportedly scheduled to participate in a panel discussion at the Hyderabad summit.
Gandhi apologised to the delegates who were allegedly not allowed into the country. “It gives you a sense of what we are dealing with in our country,” he said. Telangana Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy also criticised the Union government for cancelling the visas of delegates from 70 countries invited to the summit, warning that the world was watching India, and called on people from all walks of life to support Gandhi in his fight against what he described as autocratic rule.
There was also a striking moment on stage when Giacomo Filibeck, the Italian leader and secretary general of the Party of European Socialists, led a chant of “Vote thief, get off the throne” during the summit. Gandhi, who was on stage, was seen laughing as the chant rang out.
Gig workers, phone-tapping row and what comes next
Earlier on Saturday, before the summit address, Gandhi released the Telangana Platform-Based Gig Workers‘ Rules and held a bike rally with gig and platform workers in Hyderabad. The state government announced that gig workers would get Rs 5 lakh in life insurance cover and Rs 10 lakh in health insurance cover.
The speech came a day after Gandhi alleged on Friday that his phone was being tapped and that Prime Minister Modi knew about the alleged surveillance — a claim the BJP has rejected and asked him to prove. Shiv Sena (UBT) MLA Aaditya Thackeray backed Gandhi in Mumbai, alleging that intelligence agencies were being used against political opponents, journalists and dissenting voices, while BJP MP Ravi Kishan mocked the allegation.
For now, the political lines are sharply drawn. Gandhi has framed the fight as one between truth and non-violence on one side and what he calls fascist forces on the other, and has told his audience that defeating the Modi government is “already a done deal”. The BJP, in turn, has framed the Hyderabad event as an attempt to defame India before a foreign audience. With the Election Commission’s voter-roll revision still before the Supreme Court and the Opposition’s campaign against it continuing, the argument Gandhi made at the Rahul Gandhi Bharat Summit in Hyderabad is set to echo well beyond the summit hall.
डिस्क्लेमर: यह खबर उपलब्ध स्रोतों और सत्यापन के आधार पर तैयार की गई है। किसी तथ्य में त्रुटि होने पर सुधार प्रकाशित किया जाएगा।
