In India, opposition leader Rahul Gandhi’s conviction for criminal defamation is capturing headlines. The “world’s largest democracy” does not treat defamation as a civil matter, and the Congress Party leader faced justice in a lower court in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat.

This is for a public speech in which Gandhi declared that the prime minister has a surname shared with a couple of moneyed social and business highflyers who were convicted of corruption but got out of the country. The court ruled in favor of the petitioner, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) legislator also with the last name Modi who claimed that this was defamation of a whole bloc of intermediate caste persons.

If the Congress Party’s appeal to the higher courts fails, Gandhi will have to serve a two-year imprisonment. With suspiciously great speed he has been disqualified as an MP and cannot attend or speak in Parliament. Even before this the BJP had been contemptuously dismissing his four-month-long (early September 2022 to end January 2023) daily journey on foot from the southernmost tip of the country to Kashmir to “Unite the Country” (Bharat Jodo Yatra). This did enhance his personal public image and raise his national stature, even though it had less of an impact on the popularity of his party. This was followed by a BJP campaign against Gandhi for being “anti-national” when, during his subsequent visit to Britain, he publicly criticized Modi and his government for degrading Indian democracy.