New Delhi:Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Friday said he is fighting for the voice of India and is ready to pay any price, hours after he was disqualified from Lok Sabha. In a tweet in Hindi, the 52-year-old former Congress president said, "I am fighting for the voice of India. I am ready to pay any price."
Announcing his disqualification, the Lok Sabha Secretariat in a notification said it was effective from March 23, the day of his conviction. On Thursday, a court in Surat sentenced Gandhi to two years in jail in a defamation case, filed on a complaint by BJP MLA Purnesh Modi for his remark, "How come to all thieves have Modi as the common surname?"
Meanwhile, the Congress' top brass, including party chief Mallikarjun Kharge and former AICC chief Sonia Gandhi, met on Friday to deliberate on the party's strategy going forward after Rahul Gandhi's disqualification from Lok Sabha.
A meeting was already scheduled for Friday evening but after Rahul Gandhi's conviction, top leaders assembled at 6 pm at the party headquarters with his disqualification being top of the agenda.
Besides Kharge and Sonia Gandhi, Congress general secretaries Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, K C Venugopal, Jairam Ramesh, Rajiv Shukla and Tariq Anwar, senior leaders P Chidambaram, Anand Sharma, Ambika Soni, Mukul Wasnik, Salman Khurshid and Pawan Kumar Bansal, among others, were also present at the meeting. Sources said Rahul Gandhi's disqualification and party's strategy and plans for agitations were top of the agenda at the meeting.
Rahul Gandhi was on Friday disqualified from Lok Sabha following his conviction by a Surat court in a 2019 criminal defamation case, an action the party termed an attempt to "silence" his voice as it vowed to fight the battle legally and politically. (With Agency Inputs)
