Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Thursday (February 26, 2026) strongly criticised the police action against his party's youth wing activists over the "shirtless protest", drawing a sharp parallel between Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government and the authoritarian regime in North Korea.
"This is India, not North Korea," Mr. Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, said in a post in Hindi on X and asserted that peaceful protest is the soul of democracy and not a crime.
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He said the world's largest democracy is being slowly pushed in a direction where dissent is labelled as treason and asking questions is called a conspiracy.
When those in power start seeing themselves as the nation and dissent as the enemy -- that is when democracy dies, Mr. Gandhi said.
