India’s prime opposition chief Rahul Gandhi, heart, arrives on the Parliament in New Delhi, India, Monday. India’s Parliament reinstated Gandhi as a lawmaker three days after the nation’s prime court docket halted his prison defamation conviction for mocking Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s surname.

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India’s prime opposition chief Rahul Gandhi, heart, arrives on the Parliament in New Delhi, India, Monday. India’s Parliament reinstated Gandhi as a lawmaker three days after the nation’s prime court docket halted his prison defamation conviction for mocking Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s surname.

AP

NEW DELHI — India’s Parliament on Monday reinstated prime opposition chief Rahul Gandhi as a lawmaker three days after the nation’s prime court docket halted his prison defamation conviction for mocking the prime minister’s surname.

His reinduction as a member of Parliament is prone to strengthen the opposition’s effort to nook Narendra Modi’s authorities ahead of a no-confidence motion this week over deadly ethnic violence that has roiled India’s northeastern state of Manipur for greater than three months.

A fierce critic of Modi and his fundamental challenger within the 2024 polls, Gandhi was ousted from Parliament after his conviction by a Justice of the Peace’s court docket in March. The Supreme Court stayed his conviction Friday, which suggests it’s quickly halted whereas the court docket goes into Gandhi’s attraction intimately earlier than issuing a last ruling.

The court docket’s order additionally signifies that Gandhi will have the ability to contest subsequent yr’s basic elections until a last court docket resolution goes towards him.

The defamation case concerned feedback Gandhi made in a 2019 election speech. Gandhi requested, “Why do all thieves have Modi as their surname?” He then referred to 3 well-known and unrelated Modis: a fugitive Indian diamond tycoon, a cricket govt banned from the Indian Premier League and the prime minister.

The case was filed by Purnesh Modi, who’s a member of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party in Gujarat state however is just not associated to the prime minister.

Gandhi was sentenced to 2 years in jail however the court docket suspended his jail sentence in April. The conviction was upheld by the Gujarat state High Court so he filed an attraction within the nation’s Supreme Court final month.

The case towards Gandhi, the great-grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister and scion of the dynastic Congress occasion, was extensively condemned by opponents of Modi as the newest assault towards democracy and free speech by a authorities looking for to crush dissent. The pace of his elimination from Parliament shocked Indian politics.

India, with 1.4 billion folks, is the world’s most populous nation, however Modi’s critics say democracy has been in retreat since he got here to energy in 2014. They accuse his authorities of pursuing a Hindu nationalist agenda. The authorities denies that, saying its insurance policies profit all Indians.

The Nehru-Gandhi household has produced two different prime ministers. Rahul Gandhi’s grandmother, Indira Gandhi, was assassinated whereas in workplace, as was his father, Rajiv Gandhi, after he left workplace.