Is Nishikant Dubey’s substantive motion to expel Rahul Gandhi a red herring?

The face-off between the Centre and Rahul Gandhi, which began last week during the Motion of Thanks to the President’s Address and intensified on February 11 with the Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition’s no-holds-barred attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi over allegedly selling out India’s interests in the trade deal with the United States, shows no signs of letting up.

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On Thursday (February 12), the confrontation took a curious turn with the Centre backing out from its stand of moving a breach of privilege motion against the LoP and, instead, the ruling BJP’s habitually rabble-rousing MP Nishikant Dubey submitting a notice for a substantive motion seeking not just the termination of Rahul’s Parliament membership but also a lifetime ban on him from contesting polls.

Govt backs off privilege motion

A day earlier, soon after Rahul levelled a litany of allegations against PM Modi and Union minister Hardeep Singh Puri amid an uproar from the Treasury Benches, Parliamentary Affairs minister Kiren Rijiju had told reporters that the government would be moving a “privilege motion” against the Lok Sabha LoP for “making wild and baseless allegations” in the Lok Sabha and repeatedly violating parliamentary rules of procedure. Rijiju had asserted that the Centre would proceed with moving the notice against Rahul if the latter did not authenticate the allegations he made against the PM and Puri while speaking in the budget discussion.

While Rahul had, during his speech in Lok Sabha, asserted that he would substantiate and authenticate all the claims he was making in his speech, sources in the Lok Sabha secretariat told The Federal that the LoP did not do so till Thursday afternoon. Nonetheless, the Centre seems to have backtracked from its combative stance of Wednesday and did not move any breach of privilege notice against the LoP. Government sources claimed that the U-turn had “nothing to do with granting Rahul any concessions” but was largely on account of the fact that “all baseless allegations, defamatory content and unsubstantiated claims made by the LoP had already been expunged from the records under directions from the Lok Sabha Speaker (Om Birla)”.

A senior NDA MP, however, indicated to The Federal that the government’s change of heart could have been prompted by the belated realisation that the Lok Sabha’s Privileges Committee had not been constituted ever since the previous committee’s tenure ended in June 2024 and that a committee that may be set up at a later date “could not have inquired into a notice that was moved before it was set up”.

Substantive motion sparks row

The Centre appears to have, thus, opted for a different route to keep up the heat on Rahul with Dubey submitting a “substantive motion” against the LoP on Thursday. A substantive motion, as explained in MN Kaul and SL Shakdher’s book, Practice and Procedure of Parliament, is “a self-contained independent proposal submitted for the approval of the House and drafted in such a manner as to be capable of expressing a decision of the House.”

The parliamentary instrument has been invoked on multiple occasions in the past, most notably during the UPA years from 2005 to 2010, either to expel MPs from either House of Parliament or to suspend or reprimand them for a variety of proven misconduct or misdemeanours following an inquiry by a committee constituted for the purpose. In 2005, as many as 10 Lok Sabha MPs had been expelled in a single stroke after an enquiry committee found them guilty in the infamous cash-for-query allegations that were made by a TV news channel in a sting operation. In 2008, then BJP MP Babubhai Katara was expelled from the Lok Sabha after another inquiry committee found him guilty of trying to illegally take a woman and a boy abroad by fraudulently using the passports of his wife and son.

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Thus, Dubey’s move to file a substantive motion seeking the termination of Rahul’s Lok Sabha membership could not be brushed off lightly since the consequences of such a motion, as past precedents show, could be dire for any member. Yet, Dubey’s notice seems to have had the unwitting consequence of drawing guffaws not just within the Congress and wider Opposition camp but even within the ranks of the ruling NDA combine.

Flawed motion raises eyebrows

The notice submitted by Dubey not only relies, prima facie, on allegations that are hard to prove before any House panel, leave alone a court, but is also high on infirmities; including an instance where the BJP MP has wrongly used the name of former Prime Minister late Rajiv Gandhi in place of Rahul Gandhi.

Sample this. The notice states Rahul Gandhi “has a perpetual propensity of depicting himself as a ‘Machoman’, though he is already 55 years of age and just 5 years short of getting the title of ‘Senior Citizen’. Nonetheless, he is a frequent traveller of various destinations, especially, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and Bahrain.”

Dubey then goes on to claim that “the entire ‘Gandhi clan’ is fond of demanding high security and other paraphernalia within India, but when Shri Rajiv Gandhi (sic) goes to these countries, he neither requests the Government to extend his security cover to the visiting countries nor inform the High Commission/Embassy of India. In other words, whenever he goes out on ‘tour’, it is shrouded in mystery. The answer to this puzzle lies in his being an active member of ‘Ford Foundation’, through his so-called ‘Uncle’, ‘Gladiator-cum-Protector’ and ‘A jo-hua-so-hua saviour’. We all know that Ford Foundation is a notorious entity for destabilising various States with ‘Regime Change’.”

Congress dismisses expulsion move

The BJP MP claims Rahul has “very cleverly captured” the dais of Parliament “to foment public sentiments, levelling unsubstantiated allegations not only against the Election Commission of India but even the Honourable Supreme Court of India, lowering the dignity of the Government without any substantive evidence and putting various other institutions in bad light with the active connivance of George Soros, Ford Foundation, Satyanarayan Gangaram Pitroda alias Sam Pitroda”. Stating that an “urgent structured inquiry” to examine Rahul’s “unethical conduct in the capacity of being a Member of Parliament and the Leader of Opposition” is the “need of the hour”, Dubey had demanded “immediate expulsion” of the LoP from Lok Sabha.

Much of what Dubey has said in his notice is what he has been alleging for years both inside and outside Parliament, with neither the government nor the centrally-controlled investigative agencies taking any cue from it to launch a probe against the Lok Sabha LoP.

Congress leaders have, variously and expectedly, brushed off Dubey’s notice as a “diversionary tactic” meant to “increase his Dubey’s chances of being inducted as a minister in the cabinet” and a “mockery of parliamentary procedures under the guise of a substantive motion”, with Rahul and his sister, Wayanad MP Priyanka Gandhi too scoffing at the notice.

Experts flag procedural infirmities

Though not officially, for obvious reasons, the notice has evoked mocking chatter among BJP’s allies too. A senior NDA MP told The Federal that he felt “amused” reading the contents of the notice. “When we heard he (Dubey) was moving a notice for a substantive motion, we thought the BJP was really serious about taking on Rahul because these things (a substantive motion) can have serious consequences but when I read the notice I felt amused. Either whoever has drafted it clearly has no idea about notices, which is difficult to believe because Nishikant is among the few MPs who routinely quotes the rulebook and he knows how these things work, or it is just an exercise to divert attention from whatever Rahul and the Opposition have been saying about the trade deal and other things,” the NDA MP said.

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PDT Achary, former Secretary General of the Lok Sabha, who has also authored several books and articles explaining parliamentary procedure, told The Federal that the notice seemed to have been drafted with “no application of mind and no understanding of what constitutes a substantive motion”. “From whatever I have read about the contents of the notice, I think it is so full of infirmities that it will be rejected at the threshold. Moving a notice seeking expulsion of an MP from the House is a very serious thing and it is done in extremely rare circumstances. An MP cannot just write out a series of allegations which neither he nor Parliament is competent to investigate and prove and expect that the motion will be admitted and taken to its intended conclusion. Just saying that a member is travelling abroad and claiming that he has links with forces trying to destabilise the country doesn’t constitute grounds to admit a notice, forget order an inquiry committee,” Achary said.

With the budget session set to break on Friday (February 13) for recess, it is unlikely that Dubey will be able to move the notice before Parliament reconvenes post recess on March 9. This period will also allow him time to correct the glaring infirmities in his notice, if indeed he and his party are serious about having Rahul expelled from Parliament. If not, the notice may prove to be yet another red herring designed to draw attention away from the embarrassment the Centre faced in the Lok Sabha and outside it on account of Rahul's fiery takedown of the Indo-US trade deal, the disconcerting questions the deal has triggered among farmers, textile entrepreneurs and others as well as the disclosures in the still unravelling Epstein saga.