Union Minister Prakash Javadekar on Wednesday hit out at Congress leader Rahul Gandhi over his remark on Indian democracy where he compared India with countries like Iraq and Libya.
"Saddam Hussain and Gaddafi used to have elections. They used to win them. It wasn't like they weren't voting but there was no institutional framework to protect that vote," Gandhi had tweeted on Tuesday.
Speaking to , Javadekar said: "Giving a comment on Rahul Gandhi's opinion is worthless. Comparing India's democracy with Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein is an insult to India and its 80 crore voters."
"Only during the years of emergency, we witnessed a time like that of Gaddafi and Saddam, he added.
Gandhi had made the comment while answering to a question by Professor Ashutosh Varshney of Brown University on reports by Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), a Sweden-based institute that downgraded India to an "electoral autocracy," citing a decline in democratic freedoms and Freedom House analysis which shifted India's status from a 'free' country to 'partly-free.'
The Congress leader had also said, "Bharatiya Janata Party MPs in Parliament tell me that they cannot have an open discussion. They say they are told what to say."
The Indian government, however, has disproved the report by Freedom House and called it "misleading, incorrect and misplaced".
( With inputs from ANI )
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