The speech by Lok Sabha leader of opposition Rahul Gandhi on June 8, delivered at the INDIA alliance meeting in Delhi flagged a profoundly seminal point that the Congress party represented a resistance movement in defence of the equality of all Indians. Unlike numerous political parties in India, he claimed the Congress “was never built using the infrastructure and protection of the Indian State”. According to him, the day Mahatma Gandhi set the goal for achieving independence of India from British rule. from that date the Congress transformed itself from a political formation to a resistance movement.British rule was marked, among others, by the stifling of liberties of the people, devastation of their livelihood and the hostile character of the Indian state controlled by colonial rulers and employed against Indians and freedom fighters with no remedy available to address people’s grievances.Rahul dispelled the notions of his alliance partners the Samajwadi Party (SP), the Trinamool Congress (TMC), the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), etc. that the institutions enshrined in the Constitution would work. He did so by harping on the point that the Indian state under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) had stopped providing a fair and playing field for the neutral functioning of those institutions.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.“The BJP controls the institutions of the state. The BJP controls the legal system. The BJP controls the bureaucracy. The BJP controls the intelligence agencies. The BJP even controls the Election Commission,” he remarked with anguish.At the same time, while emphatically noting that the Congress Party is a party of resistance, Rahul forcefully remarked that its functioning is not dependent on the neutrality of the Indian state. He continued to assert that “..the more the institutions of the Indian state are throttled, the more aggressively the Congress Party will fight to defend the Constitution.”In the aforementioned utterances of Rahul, there are robust reflections of the vision of Mahatma Gandhi. Take his statement that BJP controls the legal system, which implies that getting justice in such a system controlled by the BJP, which operates the state apparatus, has become elusive.A hundred and six years ago, on October 6, 1920 Mahatma Gandhi wrote an article, “Hallucination of Law Courts” in Young India and wrote in it with sadness : “The worst is that they (law courts) support the authority of a government. They are supposed to dispense justice and are therefore called the palladile of a nation’s liberty. But when they support the authority of an unrighteous Government they are no longer palladile of liberty, they are crushing houses to crush a nation’s spirit.”So, when the nation’s spirit is crushed in 2026 because the BJP is controlling the legal system, Rahul is justly upholding the cause of resistance in which Gandhi’s vision is getting amplified.Rahul cited the BJP’s control over the Election Commission and he made the remark that there is now no possibility of conducting free and fair elections in India. “And so we have to go into a mode of resistance,” he said.It is indeed of extraordinary significance that what Rahul said in 2026 was stated by Mahatma Gandhi on May 9, 1919 while delivering a speech on the Khilafat movement: “If we had the franchise and responsible government, we could by our vote turn that government out of power.” He then asked, “ But in the absence of any such effective methods of making our will felt, what are we to do?” He said that when the government did not respond to the problems of the people, an agitation was launched and when it did not succeed they resorted to violence which Gandhi described as barbarous.Therefore, he prescribed the path of resistance which he called Satyagraha by shunning violence and based on self – restraint and love.Those words uttered in 1919 were reflected in Rahul Gandhi’s statement that the more the institutions of Indian state are throttled by Modi regime the more vigorously the Congress would fight based on the ideals of satya, ahimsa and compassion.Mahatma Gandhi in his speech at Bezwada on August 23, 1920 described the British regime as “ autocracy doubly distilled, appearing in the guise of democracy…”Those words are playing out in the context of Modi regime’s policies converting India to an elected autocracy because, in the words of Rahul, the BJP has captured all institutions of the State.Rahul cited the multiple crises manifested, among others, in NEET exam paper leaks, faulty evaluation of lakhs of answer sheets of 12th class students who wrote their exams and the destruction of the ecology of Nicobar island and saw hope in resistance to those crises to save India. His own Bharat Jodo Yatra was a form of resistance demonstrating what Gandhi called “unbending bravery.”In fact, the abiding relevance of Rahul’s idea of resistance in the wake of the BJP capturing the institutions of the state and mounting anger of people flow from Mahatma Gandhi’s idea of Swaraj, one aspect of which is anchored in resistance.Gandhi wrote on January 29, 1925 that “real Swaraj will come not by the acquisition of authority by a few but by the acquisition of the capacity by all to resist authority when it is abused. In other words, Swaraj is to be obtained by education of the masses to a sense of their capacity to regulate and control authority.”S.N. Sahu served as an officer on special duty to former President K.R. Narayanan.This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.