Indian political scion Rahul Gandhi says India's democracy is under threat

The only way to heal an India polarized by divisive politics is to build "a shop of love in the marketplace of hate," said Rahul Gandhi, Indian political scion and de-facto opposition leader to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's hard-line Hindu party, as he addressed a packed audience of expatriate Indians from New Jersey, New York and elsewhere at Manhattan's Javits Center this week.

Gandhi, an outspoken critic of the highly popular Modi, enjoys high visibility among expatriate Indians.

Barely 21 when his father, the former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, was assassinated, and just a teenager when his grandmother Indira Gandhi was killed, Rahul Gandhi belongs to the long-reigning Nehru-Gandhi family that produced three Indian heads of state.

Now 52, Gandhi has struggled to carve out a strong political identity as a counter to the charismatic Modi and his ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP. Modi's ascent to power in 2014 was viewed by many as a sign of the Indian electorate’s frustration with decades of party rule by the dynastic Indian National Congress.

Gandhi’s recent six-day visit to the United States came just weeks before Modi makes his state visit to the U.S on June 22.

We must build “a shop of love — nafrat ki bazaar mein muhabbat ki dukaan — in this marketplace of hatred,” by addressing issues that impact Indian citizens instead of dividing them, he said in Hindi to resounding applause at the Javits Center on Sunday. The event was organized by the Indian Congress party's overseas arm.

Earlier on his U.S. visit, Gandhi had delivered a guest lecture at Stanford University and addressed the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. His last stop in New York City included a dinner attended by New York Mayor Eric Adams.

'Attack' on India's democratic institutions

Protecting India’s secular and democratic foundation from the threat posed by Modi’s populist policies was at the core of his vision for India’s future, Gandhi told the 3,000-strong crowd of Indian Americans and expatriates.

Gandhi’s words struck a nerve with many in the audience, who shared his alarm and sadness at what he called “a full-scale attack on our democratic institutions — on our judiciary, on our media.”

“It is your responsibility and our responsibility to defend the idea of India. And the central piece of the idea of India is our constitution and our democracy,” he said.

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International groups have called attention to a move toward autocracy under Modi. India's Supreme Court recently ruled to protect press freedoms, which have been on the decline according to watchdog group Reporters without Borders. A 2022 Amnesty International report cited "a regression" in human rights in India.

Gandhi, who extolls secular values and the rule of law, presents himself as the polar opposite of Modi, a two-term prime minister who has promoted pride of place to India in the new global order, undertaken ambitious schemes to tackle corruption and modernized infrastructure, while permitting his party to push a Hindu nationalist agenda.

Modi's party is affiliated with Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a right-wing group that aims for India's "social transformation" into a Hindu nation.

“There is too much power concentrated in one person’s hand under Modi,” said Upender Solanki, a Texas-based financial technology executive who took a red-eye flight from Dallas to New York to listen to Rahul Gandhi speak.

Modi’s ruling party does not only incite divisions between Hindus and Muslims, Solanki said. In New Delhi, the Indian capital, caste-based differences were being used to distract from a public protest launched by India's top women wrestlers, he said. India's Olympic-level women wrestlers, most of whom hail from the northern states of Punjab and Haryana, have accused a powerful B.J.P politician who heads the wrestling federation of sexual harassment, a charge he denies.

Fomenting unrest between Muslims and Hindus

Solanki met Tejinder Mann, who made the trip from Los Angeles to hear Gandhi's speech in New York. Both men hail from Haryana’s Jat community, one of many castes in India’s layered rural societies. Caste-based electioneering is a common tactic in Indian politics. Several of the protesting women wrestlers are Jats.

“In Muzaffarnagar, they made us Hindus. In Haryana, they made us Jats. This is how they divide us,” Mann said of the B.J.P. He was referring to two unrelated incidents — riots between Muslims and Hindu Jats that erupted in Muzaffarnagar in 2013, a year before Modi came to power, and violence in Haryana between Jats and other castes over quotas in access to higher education and public sector jobs in 2016.

Mann, who is from a family of farmers, was also unhappy with the Modi government’s proposed overhaul in 2020 of the “mandi” or marketplace system through which farmers in northern states sell their produce. Thousands of farmers staged months-long non-violent protests against the proposed farm laws on the outskirts of New Delhi through summer and winter during the pandemic in 2021, protesting laws that would expose them to the free market. The government later withdrew the laws.

“I live in the U.S., but my father was a farmer," Mann said in Hindi. "So is my uncle. My heart is in my village. I feel their pain.”

Fines and prison for religious conversion

Mann and Solanki also criticized a controversial 2022 law passed in Haryana and in several Indian states that slams fines and prison sentences on people participating in religious conversions. The laws, widely seen as targeting Muslims and Christians, were cited in a U.S state department report released in March that criticized the decline of religious freedoms in India. The laws also put the burden of proving innocence on the accused, according to the report. “The police can decide who is guilty and put you in jail on a pretension,” said Mann.

Gandhi’s visit came at a critical point in his own political career, just months after he was disqualified from government and handed a two-year jail sentence for criminal defamation for a comment he made linking the surname “Modi” to two criminals with the same last name in 2019.

The charge, which the Congress party said was another example of the BJP “throttling” free speech, was followed by the jail sentence, currently on appeal. It disqualifies Gandhi from standing for a highly anticipated national election next year.

“I may be the first person in Indian history since 1947" when India won independence from the British "to be given the maximum sentence on defamation…and that too on the first offence,” Gandhi said in his speech at Stanford. A court in Modi’s home state of Gujarat delivered the jail sentence over charges filed by a local B.J.P politician accusing Gandhi for comments made in another state.

4,000-mile walk across India

The BJP has said Gandhi’s comments are “anti-India” and “insulting.”

“To go to another country and lie and portray India poorly is anti-India,” said Anurag Thakur, India's sports and youth affairs minister, when asked why his party was even reacting to Gandhi’s criticism of Modi. He said other world leaders respected Modi and elevated him, while Gandhi was sore about being expelled from government.

But Gandhi has enjoyed a popularity boost from a 4,000-mile walk he took across the length of India last year, a gesture to unite the country and respond to the BJP’s divisiveness. Many saw the “Bharat-jodo” or “Unite India” march as a sign of Gandhi’s political maturing. That success was followed by his party’s upset win by a landslide over the BJP a month ago in the southern state of Karnataka, home to Bangalore, a major global tech center.

Teaneck resident Shaheen Khateeb, a Muslim, hails from Karnataka. “I think the Karnataka election has really revitalized the Congress party, and there is an optimism," he said. "We are tired of the Hindu vs Muslim politics played out in India. We need to start paying attention to the real issues that bog down India today, the financial and unemployment issues.”

Sitting in a front row seat during Gandhi's New York speech was Sunita Patel from Atlanta. Patel, who hails from Modi’s home state of Gujarat, flew to Delhi and traveled to the city of Kathua near Kashmir to join Gandhi as he neared the end of his walk in January. “In America people see us as Indians, not as Gujaratis. We should be united as humans. Our democracy depends on that,” she said.

Future head of state?

Gandhi’s party is not expected to unseat Modi’s in the 2024 elections, but many who support Gandhi now see him as a possible head of state in the future. And the politicians and expatriate Congress officials speaking at the Javits Center gave Gandhi that top billing.

Attendees said they were drawn to his ideology, but also to his demeanor.

New Yorker and economist Bipasha Chatterjee wanted to give him her visiting card; the two studied development economics in Cambridge University together in 1994. They weren’t close, but she wanted to connect with him if it was possible to, she said.

“He was always very genuine,” she said, noting he had maintained that quality even now in the public eye. “The difference was that he was heavily guarded at the time. He was in a bubble. Now he’s engaging a lot more with people, but the genuineness comes through,” she said.

Gandhi completed his undergraduate studies at Harvard and Rollins College in the U.S under security threats following his father’s 1991 assassination in a suicide attack in southern India.

“I definitely see a growth in the man, and especially with the Bharat Jodo Yatra," said Treasa from Long Island, who attended Gandhi's New York speech and asked that only her first name be used. "It’s a beautiful way that he’s maturing and I hope one day he becomes prime minister.” Modi deserved credit as an administrator, she said, but Gandhi was the person who could unite India.

Restless children squirmed on seats while their enthusiastic parents clapped and Congress party members wearing the colors of the Indian flag paraded and chanted slogans, transforming the auditorium into the sort of vigorous political theater seen at India’s rallies.

A small group of protesters on 11th Avenue pushing for the creation of a separatist state called “Khalistan” in what is now Punjab reportedly delayed the event. When one of them entered the hall and heckled Gandhi, he responded cordially with a greeting. “You cannot cut hatred with hatred,” he said. The audience cheered. Gandhi's grandmother, Indira, was killed by her bodyguard for her sending the army into a Sikh temple during the Khalistan insurgency in Punjab.

Displaying a political savvy that had been absent during his first years in politics, Gandhi used the incident to make a dig at Modi’s BJP. “Our work is to spread love," he said. "Your work is to spread hatred. We do our work — why would we do yours?”

“It disturbs me when I see the pain in India," Gandhi said at Stanford. "That creates an emotional response in me, that I can’t fight.

"Also, I’ve grown up with a narrative of my country. A Gandhian narrative, that’s what drives me,” he said, referring to Mahatma Gandhi’s legacy of harmony and non-violence. The two Gandhis are not related.

“I defend an idea,” he said, exhorting non-resident Indians to do the same.

Security guards whisked Gandhi away as soon as his talk ended.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Rahul Gandhi to NJ Indians: India's democracy is threatened