By Jose Kavi

New Delhi, August 7, 2023: The return of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi to the Indian Parliament 135 days after his disqualification has reassured people’s faith in the Indian judiciary, say some Christian intellectuals.

Gandhi, who represented Kerala’s Wayanad constituency in the Lok Sabha, was reinstated August 7 after the Supreme Court stayed his conviction in a criminal defamation case.

Gandhi was disqualified as a Lok Sabha member on March 24, a day after a Gujarat court convicted him and sentenced him to two years in jail.

A punishment of two years or more automatically disqualifies a lawmaker.

While Jesuit social scientist Father Cedric Prakash says Gandhi’s reinstatement “is a step in the right direction,” his confrere Father Stanislaus Alla, a moral theology professor in Delhi, says the apex court’s action reassures that the Indian judiciary is willing to uphold the laws instead of succumbing to pressures.

Father Alla says people become sad, frustrated and angry when they see justice denied, helping falsehood to prevail.

“However, our sacred books, including the Bible and the Upanishads declare that ‘Truth’ alone should prevail and not falsehood,” he explains.

Father Cedric says Gandhi’s conviction by various courts in Gujarat, his expulsion from parliament and subsequent stay by the Supreme Court “throw up many important lessons which could have an important bearing on the future of democracy in India.”

Capuchin Father Suresh Mathew, Editor of the Indian Currents weekly, says hardly any politician in India has been abused and lampooned as much as Gandhi.

“When they abuse him or call him Pappu, what they reveal is their sense of desperation over his growing popularity, as seen during the Bharat Jodo Yatra (knit India march),” Father Suresh says.

M.P. Raju, a senior Supreme Court advocate, says the stay of Gandhi’s conviction and his consequent reinstatement of his parliamentary membership has brought “a silver lining among the dark clouds of supremacist weaponization of the legal system including the adjudicatory processes.”

Such weaponization could “induce undeserved complacency” in the Indian polity, permitting it to keep its chips down, adds the noted lawyer.

Sister Jessy Kurian, another Supreme Court lawyer, says Gandhi’s return to the parliament has made history in Indian democracy. She says the staying of Gandhi’s conviction is “a legal victory and a political defeat” of his opponents.

“In the jampacked court room No. 4, amidst pin drop silence the order was pronounced,” Sister Kurian, a former member of the National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions, told Matters India August 7.

She says the supreme court order is “an eye opener to all the judges in India” that they should pass judgments based on Indian law and not on Indian politics.

Father Prakash, who is also a human rights activist, finds the lower courts in India “still reek with biases and to the kowtowing of their political masters.”

The system, he says, is “by and large vindictive and one which does not tolerate a different opinion and much less actual dissent.”

The Jesuit, who works for reconciliation and peace, finds the Supreme Court, “being the last resort,” still by and large impartial and just.

The nation now looks up to “young and energetic visionary leaders” like Gandhi, he says.

“Besides now being back in Parliament Gandhi is bound to be a star leader of the opposition in the no-confidence motion and debate on the Manipur violence,” the Jesuit says.

Father Suresh says Gandhi has proved in the Supreme Court that the Surat judge “was erroneous” while awarding him the maximum punishment in a defamation case. “In one stroke, his political opponents tried to remove him from the political arena. That is why he was given the maximum punishment and the Speaker had shown over enthusiasm to issue the disqualification notice immediately,” the editor explains.

He also says India needs Rahul and his “mohabbat ka dookan” (Shop of love) amid “hatred and violence preached and propagated by religious bigots under the umbrella of Parivar.”

The editor says the political vendetta on Rahul would boomerang on the perpetrators when the citizens would give them a fitting response.

Raju, an author of several books, including “India’s Constitution: Roots, Values and Wrongs,” warns that the “real threat to the rule of law perhaps lies more somewhere else than the unnaturalness of ‘Rahulian’ conviction for the projected crime of ‘Modified’ defamation and the award of unnatural maximum punishment.”

He wonders what would have happened if the apex court bench was headed by judges who were like those in the Gujarat courts and others, who walk away from the Constitution and its composite morality.

“Though the motives may not appear to be bad, but the stream of reasoning and legal logic stood utterly poisoned either due to their subconsciouses having become bent towards the pseudo-Hindu virulence or drunk heavily with anti-‘family’, anti-Muslim or anti-‘other’ rhetoric,” he explains.

He says “an unwavering vigilance and not any blind faith in the judiciary is the price of our basic human rights and the hard-earned democracy.”

Sister Kurian says the apex court’s remarks on the Gujarat courts shows their judgment was politically biased.

“The conclusion is that the judiciary should be above politics and no judgement should be politically motivated and biased,” she explains.

Father Alla wants the Indian Church to recall Martin Luther King’s iconic phrase ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice’ and work for promoting Constitutional values that would enable us to work for the well-being of all.