New Delhi:

The Congress get together referred to as a method assembly this night after it suffered a significant blow when parliament disqualified its chief, Rahul Gandhi, a day after a court docket convicted him of defamation for feedback that many thought-about insulting to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Prime Congress leaders, together with get together chief Mallikarjun Kharge, former Congress president Sonia Gandhi, former Union Minister P Chidambaram, have been in attendance.

Apart from Mr Kharge and Sonia Gandhi, Congress normal secretaries Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, KC Venugopal, Jairam Ramesh, Rajiv Shukla and Tariq Anwar, senior leaders Anand Sharma, Ambika Soni, Mukul Wasnik, Salman Khurshid and Pawan Kumar Bansal, amongst others, have been additionally current on the assembly.

Mr Gandhi “stands disqualified from the membership of Lok Sabha from the date of his conviction”, the decrease home of parliament stated in a discover earlier right now.

“I’m preventing for the voice of India and am able to pay any value for it,” he tweeted in Hindi, in his first response after the disqualification.

The 52-year-old was convicted and sentenced to jail for 2 years by a court docket in Surat on Thursday after he was discovered responsible of defamation in reference to a 2019 speech during which he referred to thieves as having the surname Modi.

His feedback have been seen as a slur towards the Prime Minister, who went on to win the election in a landslide.

He is because of enchantment towards the decision in a district court docket in Gujarat, additionally PM Modi’s dwelling state.

A number of Congress lawmakers and leaders of regional opposition events – Mamata Banerjee, Arvind Kejriwal, MK Stalin, Uddhav Thackeray, KCR, Akhilesh Yadav – backed Mr Gandhi and attacked the ruling BJP authorities for its “dictatorship”.

Nevertheless, members of the federal government and different BJP leaders stated Mr Gandhi’s comment was a smear towards all these sharing the Modi surname.

“Rahul Gandhi is a routine free cannon and he thinks he can say something with out ever going through the implications,” info minister Anurag Thakur stated. Ravi Shankar Prasad, a spokesman for the BJP, stated the court docket had acted with “due judicial course of”.

Earlier right now, Congress lawmakers gathered exterior the parliament to protest Mr Gandhi’s conviction, Some get together members additionally staged protests towards his disqualification throughout the nation.