Rahul Gandhi has been appointed as the Leader of the Opposition in the Indian Parliament

NEW DELHI:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s main rival, Rahul Gandhi, was appointed on Tuesday to lead India’s opposition in parliament, a key post that has been vacant for a decade.

Congress Party general secretary KC Venugopal said Gandhi would be “a bold voice for the common people of India” and ensure the government is “firmly held accountable at all times,” he told reporters in a statement.

Venugopal said Congress party president Sonia Gandhi, Rahul’s mother, had written to the interim speaker of parliament informing him that he had been “appointed as the leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha”, India’s lower house.

The Congress leader defied analysts’ expectations and exit polls to help his Congress party nearly double its parliamentary numbers, the best result since Modi came to power in 2014. Gandhi is a scion of the dynasty that has dominated Indian politics for decades and is the son, grandson, and great-grandson of former prime ministers, starting with independence leader Jawaharlal Nehru.

Parliamentary rules require the leader of the opposition to come from a party that controls at least 10% of MPs in the 543-seat lower house. The post has been vacant for 10 years because two dismal election results for the Congress – once India’s dominant party – dropped it below that threshold.

Modi and his Hindu nationalist BJP have ruled definitively for the past decade, but have failed to repeat the previous two landslide victories this time around, despite widespread expectations of another easy triumph.

Earlier on Tuesday, Gandhi was sworn in as a newly elected member of parliament. “Protecting the Constitution is the duty of every patriotic Indian,” he said in a statement soon after. “We will fulfill this duty to the fullest.”

Gandhi is one of several top opposition figures facing criminal proceedings in cases they claim are politically driven by the Modi government.

He was sentenced to two years in prison last year in 2023 in a separate case in Gujarat, but was not jailed after an appeal to India’s highest court. The sentence, however, forced his brief expulsion from parliament until the Supreme Court stayed his conviction.