Indian politician Rahul Gandhi handed two years in jail for defaming prime minister

One of India’s leading opposition politicians, Rahul Gandhi, has been sentenced to two years in jail for defaming the prime minister's surname.

The sentence was handed down to Mr Gandhi, 52, by a court in Gujarat, the home state of India’s increasingly authoritarian prime minister Narendra Modi. Mr Gandhi made a speech in 2019 where he alleged that all thieves have the surname Modi.

Mr Gandhi has been granted bail for one month until the sentence starts.

Mallikarjun Kharge, president of the Congress Party which Mr Gandhi led from 2017 to 2019, tweeted: “The Modi government is a victim of political bankruptcy. We will appeal in the higher court.”

The Congress Party added that the case came from India’s “cowardly and dictatorial” ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) because he was “exposing their dark deeds”.

Completed a 'unity march'

The party is expected to provide the biggest challenge to Mr Modi’s BJP in next year’s general election, having surprisingly defeated it in November 2022’s state election in Himachal Pradesh.

Mr Gandhi, the scion of the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty, also completed a 2,485-mile “unity march” from Kanyakumari in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu to Srinagar, the capital of Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, in January 2023.

The five-month march is thought to have galvanised public support for the Congress Party across India, causing concern for the BJP.

Mr Modi and the BJP have carried out an unprecedented crackdown against opposition politicians, activists, NGOs and the media.

'Conspiracies are being hatched'

In February, police in Delhi also arrested Manish Sisodia, a leading opposition politician from India’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), a fast-growing force in power in India’s capital and the western state of Punjab.

“Conspiracies are being hatched.. and false cases [are] being lodged against our party leaders because PM Narendra Modi is afraid of Arvind Kejriwal’s [the leader of the AAP] rising popularity. As AAP grows further, [the] BJP will continue to slap false cases on us,” said Mr Sisodia.

India has dropped 19 places to 46th on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s democracy index since Mr Modi first took power in 2014. In 2021, Freedom House, a political advocacy organisation, demoted India from a “free” to only “partly free” country.