The Assam Chief Minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma, responded to the protests by saying, “Tomorrow if the court convicts me of something, will the BJP MLA wear black clothes and protest? ” after the congress leaders in the Assam assembly expressed their outrage over Rahul Gandhi’s exclusion from the Lok Sabha. No, we won’t challenge the judiciary’s ruling, he said. “This trend is bad for Indian democracy,” he added. “We will go to the high court, the Supreme court, and the sessions court.
Are you going to criticize Justices Pattnaik, Mukhopadhyay, and Verma? They might be mistaken, but there is a set legal process. Biswa said, he further added, “you can go to the Sessions court, the High court, or the Supreme court.”
The Assam CM asked during the disruption of the assembly by protestors over the disqualification of the Congress leader Rahul Gandhi from the Lok Sabha, “Court judgments may be in a person’s favor or may even go against him. But will you launch protests just because a particular judgment went against you? Will you seek an adjournment motion in Parliament?”
2019 saw the defamation case conviction of Rahul Gandhi. When Gandhi quipped, “How come all the robbers have Modi as the common surname,” he was making fun of the Prime Minister at the time. At a rally in Kolar, Karnataka, he made this statement.
The CM stated, “Judiciary is a double-edged sword; sometimes we will receive a decision against us, and other times we will receive a ruling in our favor. But will we oppose the judiciary, and that too a judicial verdict which is not in the jurisdiction of the court of Assam?”
“On August 30, 2013, Kapil Sibal introduced a bill in the Rajya Sabha that stated that a member of parliament would not be disqualified from office but would not receive a salary. In September, the UPA govt received an ordinance; Manmohan Singh was the prime minister and he was on a tour of the US; had that Ordinance been passed, Rahul Gandhi would have remained a Lok Sabha member. But what he did? He called a press conference and tore the ordinance before the media.