“We are going back to the medieval times,” says Rahul Gandhi on new Bills

Referring the constitutional Bills aimed at removing persons from office if they are jailed for any offence for more than 30 days, Congress leader and Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday (August 20, 2025) said these legislation take one back to “the medieval times when the king could just remove anybody at his will.” 

Mr. Gandhi was speaking at the felicitation programme for the Opposition’s joint candidate for the Vice-Presidential polls, Justice (retired) B. Sudershan Reddy. “We are going back to the medieval times when the king could just remove anybody at his will,” Mr. Gandhi said. There was no concept of what an elected person was, he said, adding, “If he doesn’t like your face, he tells ED [Enforcement Directorate] to put a case, and then a democratically elected person is wiped out within 30 days… this is new.” 

Also read | TDP and JD(U) support the Bills but express reservation about several ‘grey areas’ in the legislations 

The Opposition parliamentary leaders met on Wednesday (August 20, 2025) to discuss their strategy to oppose the Bills. As per sources, it was suggested by a few leaders at the meeting that the Opposition should not nominate any of its members to the Parliament’s Joint Committee which would be constituted to review the legislation. “Any kind of participation will be equal to legitimising these Bills,” a senior leader opined. However, the Opposition has not taken a final call on this.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin too flayed the Bills. Ms. Banerjee, in a long post on X, said these legislation aimed to “finish the independence of our judiciary.” The Bills are “nothing short of a Hitlerian assault on the very soul of Indian democracy,” she said.

Ms. Banerjee claimed that the Bills were to “empower” the Union government “to intrude upon the mandate of the people, handing sweeping powers to unelected authorities like the ED and the CBI to interfere in the functioning of elected State governments”. “It is a step to empower the Prime Minister and the Union Home Minister in a sinister manner at the expense of the basic principles of our Constitution,” the Trinamool Congress chairperson said.

False cases

DMK chief Mr. Stalin said this was how “dictatorships” begin. “Steal votes, Silence rivals and Crush States,” he wrote on X. Condemning the Bills, he said, “The plan of these Bills is clear. It allows the BJP to foist false cases against political opponents in power across States and remove them by misusing provisions that treat even a 30-day arrest as a ground for removal of an elected leader, without any conviction or trial. This unconstitutional amendment will certainly be struck down by the courts because guilt is decided only after trial, not by the mere registration of a case.”

CPI(M) General Secretary M.A. Baby said the Bills exposed the government’s “neo-fascist characteristics” and was a “direct assault on our democracy”.  Communist Party of India Rajya Sabha member P. Sandosh Kumar said the three Bills would open “floodgates of vendetta politics”. CPI(ML) Liberation general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya said the Bills would sound the “death knell” for federalism. “Every State government opposed to the BJP’s politics and policies will henceforth be rendered permanently destabilised and dysfunctional. Every NDA ally will be on tenterhooks to fall in line with the BJP,” he said in a statement.