The entire country knows that Rahul Gandhi is Hindustani: Priyanka Gandhi had said. (File)
Highlights
- Election Commission has issued a notice to Congress chief Rahul Gandhi
- Poll body sought Rahul Gandhi's response within 48 hours
- The Congress president is yet to comment on the matter
The Election Commission has issued a notice to Congress president Rahul Gandhi for allegedly claiming at a Madhya Pradesh rally that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has come up with a new law that allows tribals to be shot.
"Narendra Modi has made a new law that allows police to shoot at tribals. The law says that tribals can be attacked. They take away your lands, they take away their forests, they take away your water, and then they say that tribals can be shot at," the notice quoted Mr Gandhi as saying at a rally in Shahdol on April 23. It has sought a response in this regard within 48 hours.
The Congress president is yet to comment on the matter.
On Tuesday, the Union home ministry had issued a separate notice to the Congress president on his citizenship status after Rajya Sabha parliamentarian Subramanian Swamy filed a complaint. According to the notice, Mr Gandhi had declared his nationality as British in the annual returns of a company registered at Winchester, Hamshire, in the United Kingdom.
The allegation was trashed by his sister, Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra. "The entire country knows that Rahul Gandhi is Hindustani. Everybody knows he was born, raised here. What rubbish," she told reporters, adding that the notice was born out of "a fear of losing".
Incidentally, Mr Swamy used the same documents to lodge a complaint before the ethics committee of Parliament in 2015. Mr Gandhi had responded back then by calling it an "endeavor to malign my name".