In his speech in the Lok Sabha today, PM Narendra Modi took several potshots at Rahul Gandhi. At one point, PM Modi hinted that Rahul Gandhi is a ‘tubelight’. During the course of his speech, Rahul Gandhi rose to make an intervention when the PM was speaking. The Prime Minister said, “I was speaking for the last 30-40 minutes but it took this long for the current to reach there. Many tubelight are like this.”
PM Modi’s humour and quick-witted sarcasm left the house tapping on the bench and splitting their sides with laughter. Amongst them was one Congress MP, Kodikunnil Suresh, who also couldn’t hide his laughter when PM Modi called Rahul Gandhi a tube light. The MP, who occupied the seat right next to the Wayanad MP burst into splits of laughter when Modi threw the ‘tube light’ pun at Rahul Gandhi.
In the video shared by news agency ANI, at around 1.19 minutes, K Suresh is seen giggling at the jibe meted out at his supremo.
#WATCH Prime Minister Narendra Modi after Rahul Gandhi made an intervention in his speech in Lok Sabha: I was speaking for the last 30-40 minutes but it took this long for the current to reach there. Many tubelights are like this. pic.twitter.com/NwbQVBHWPx
— ANI (@ANI) February 6, 2020
Modi, who today took the house by storm with his impeccable comic timing and sarcasm, was quick to notice K Suresh and almost immediately mocked him for laughing at his boss. “Yeh Sureshji kyon has rahen hain ji?” (why is Sureshji laughing?) questioned Modi immediately drawing everyone’s attention towards the Congress MP. “There is certainly some secret”, said Modi, laughingly telling the MP that ‘one day even he will get the opportunity”..leaving the house to wonder what opportunity Modi was referring to.. to mock or be mocked at!
In the video of Modi’s full Lok Sabha speech shared below, Modi can be heard at around 24.25 minutes jeering Congress MP K Suresh.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32gz8FyLLUo]
Kodikunnil Suresh is a member of the sixteenth Lok Sabha representing Mavelikara Constituency in Kerala. He is six-time MP and is serving his seventh term in the Parliament. The former Minister of State in the Ministry of Labour is presently the working president of Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee.
Suresh was in news recently when he had miffed the Congress interim President Sonia Gandhi by taking oath in Hindi as a member of the 17th Lok Sabha. Reportedly, Sonia had expressed displeasure with Kodikunnil then for delivering the oath in Hindi, as various states seek to oppose the Central government’s move to impose Hindi in different quarters.
After Kodikunnil went back to his seat following the oath, Sonia Gandhi reportedly asked him why he delivered oath in Hindi and not Malayalam. Following this, Sonia Gandhi had asked other MPs from Kerala to deliver the oath in Malayalam itself.
K Suresh is the same Congress MP who was in 2017 suspended from the Lok Sabha for five days for “highly unbecoming” conduct that “undermined the Chair’s dignity” along with 5 other Congress MPs. The then Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan in the suspension order stated that all the suspended members had torn official papers and thrown it towards the Chair, prompting members of the treasury benches to shout “shame, shame”.
Some of these members had picked up papers from the Lok Sabha Secretariat staffers’ table and had torn and thrown them, Mahajan said, adding that all this had happened despite her agreeing to a discussion on the issue.
Moreover, a year before this incident, police had registered a case against Congress MP Kodikunnil Suresh for allegedly trespassing into the house of a couple at Kanaka Nagar area in the city in connection with a property dispute.
In 2010, in fact, the Kerala High Court had annulled the election of Congress leader Kodikunnil Suresh from the reserved Mavelikkara Lok Sabha constituency for producing a fake scheduled caste certificate. Suresh, a five-time Lok Sabha member at the time, had defeated the CPI’s R.S. Anil Kumar by more than 45,000 votes the previous year. Kumar had later alleged that Suresh was a Cheramar Christian but had submitted a false certificate showing him as Cheramar Hindu, a scheduled caste.
Justice M. Sasidharan Nambiar had at the time criticised the returning officer for accepting the nomination without verifying if Suresh belonged to the scheduled caste.
Later, the Supreme Court had reversed the decision of the High Court. While challenging the HC order, K Suresh had contended that his parents had converted to Christianity due to abject poverty and he reconverted to Hinduism in 1978 after undergoing an expiatory ceremony.
Justice Patnaik, writing the 41-page judgement for the bench noted “the case of appellant is that in four earlier elections the voters of a constituency reserved for SC have elected him from the constituency and this conduct of the voters show that the members of the SC have accepted him back to the fold of his original caste namely, the Cheramar community.
“The fact that the appellant had been elected four times from the Adoor parliamentary constituency reserved for the SC is a very strong circumstance to establish that he has been accepted by the members of his caste after his reconversion to Hinduism.”
With the colourful past that Congress K Suresh has had, it is no surprise that he would burst out laughing when his leader, who has had an equally coloured past was being pasted by PM Modi for his abject silliness.
