The election results for Gandhi’s Indian National Congress party defied analysts’ expectations and helped resurrect his political career.
Rahul Gandhi, a scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family that ruled India for decades after independence, has been named leader of the opposition in the Indian parliament following an election result that brought his party back from the political wilderness.
Leaders of India’s main opposition party, the Indian National Congress, on Saturday unanimously recommended Gandhi for election as India’s opposition leader, a post that has been vacant since 2014.
“We have unanimously passed a resolution that Rahul Gandhi should be made Leader of Opposition in the Assembly,” party general secretary KC Venugopal said at a press conference after a meeting of party leaders.
The nomination is due to be discussed at a meeting of 232 lawmakers from the Parliament-led opposition coalition later on Saturday.
India’s ruling BJP on Tuesday lost its majority in parliament, contrary to exit polls, shocking many of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s supporters.
The BJP will still form the next government, but for the first time in its 10 years in power, it will rely on regional partners under the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) umbrella.
Prime Minister Modi is scheduled to take oath of office for his third term on Sunday.
“The voters have punished the BJP.”
The six-week election saw 640 million voters head to the polls across India and saw the party nearly double its parliamentary representation, its best showing since Modi came to power a decade ago.
The comeback follows Gandhi’s victory after an embarrassing defeat representing Amethi city in Uttar Pradesh in 2019. This year, he won two constituencies – Rai Bareli in Uttar Pradesh and Wayanad in Kerala – and he will eventually have to choose which constituency to represent.
The centrepiece of Gandhi’s election campaign were long marches crisscrossing the country to rally support against Prime Minister Modi.
Indian National Congress spokeswoman Aishwarya Mahadev hailed the march as the party’s biggest attempt in recent years to connect with people across India’s diverse nations.
“We wanted to hear from the people on the ground and give them a voice. So, throughout the yatra, [marches]”We saw Rahul Gandhi listening to the voices of people from traditionally oppressed and marginalised communities, voices that are rarely heard,” she told Al Jazeera in March.
She added that the march was “not about political glitz or boasting” but about reaching out to people on the ground, to be heard and to be their voice.
Gandhi is the great-grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, who became India’s first prime minister after independence in 1947. His grandmother, Indira Gandhi, and his father, Rajiv Gandhi, also served in that position, and his mother was a long-time senior figure in the Indian National Congress.
There was a comprehensive outpouring of support for the younger Gandhi after the results were counted on Tuesday, with several people seen wearing white T-shirts with a picture of Gandhi printed on the back at the party headquarters in New Delhi.
“The voters have punished the BJP,” Gandhi, leader of the Indian National Congress party, told reporters after the results. “I was confident that the people of the country would respond in the right way.”
“The BJP could not win a majority on its own,” Rajiv Shukla, a member of the Indian National Congress party, told reporters at the time. “It is a moral defeat for them.”
Reduced mission
But the surge in opposition seats is not the only factor changing the way India legislates and writes laws in a country of 1.4 billion people.
With Modi now facing a shortened term in office, analysts say the allies he will have to rely on to stay in power could also act as a check on his administration.
Critics have long accused the ruling majority Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government of ramming bills through Parliament without debate or discussion.
That’s no longer easy, Sandeep Shastri, national coordinator of the Lokniti Network, a research programme at the New Delhi-based Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), previously told Al Jazeera.
“For the BJP, the fight in the Assembly is obviously going to be very tough.”
