The LoP Rahul Gandhi's Voice Gagged in Parliament: What Has Been Gagged?

[Sukla Sen]

<https://x.com/i/status/2018887850939556212>

This is the text that was not allowed to be read?

(Just watch: <https://www.instagram.com/reel/DUQGxnyCuaI/>.)

This is obviously a screenshot of an excerpt from an article, 'Naravane's Moment of Truth: An army chief’s unpublished memoir exposes how the Modi government spun the China border crisis' by Sushant Singh carried by the latest, Jan. 31/Feb 1 2026, issue of the Caravan Magazine (ref.: <https://caravanmagazine.in/security/navarane-memoir-ladakh-crisis>), discussing the said unpublished memoir titled 'Four Stars of Destiny' by General Manoj Mukund Naravane. 

Reproduced below is a full transcription of the visible text in the image (note that the bottom of the page is slightly cut off in the screenshot):

LIEUTENANT GENERAL YOGESH JOSHI, the chief of the Indian Army's Northern Command, received a phone call at 8.15 pm on 31 August 2020. The information he received alarmed him. Four Chinese tanks, supported by infantry, had begun moving up a steep mountain track towards Rechin La in eastern Ladakh. Joshi reported the movement to the chief of army staff, General Manoj Mukund Naravane, who immediately grasped the severity of the situation. The tanks were within a few hundred metres of Indian positions on the Kailash Range, the strategic high ground that Indian forces had seized, hours earlier, in a dangerous race with China's People's Liberation Army. In this terrain on the disputed Line of Actual Control—the de facto border between the two countries—every metre of elevation translates to strategic dominance.

The Indian soldiers fired an illuminating round, a kind of warning shot. It had the effect. The Chinese kept advancing. Naravane began making frantic calls to the leaders of India's political and military establishment, including Rajnath Singh, the defence minister, Ajit Doval, the national security adviser, General Bipin Rawat, the chief of defence staff, and S Jaishankar, the minister for external affairs. "To each and every one my question was, 'What are my orders?'" Naravane writes in his as-yet-unpublished memoir, Four Stars of Destiny.

The situation was deteriorating dramatically and demanded clarity. There was an existing protocol. Naravane had clear orders not in open fire "till cleared from the very top". His superiors did not give any clear directive. Minutes ticked by. At 9.10 pm, Joshi called again: The Chinese tanks continued to advance and were now less than a kilometre from the pass. At 9.25 pm, Naravane called Rajnath again, asking "For clear directions." None came.

Meanwhile, a message arrived from the PLA commander, Major General Liu Lin. He proposed a cooling down of sorts: both sides should stop further movement, and local commanders would meet at the pass at 9.30 am the following morning, with three representatives each. It seemed like a reasonable proposition. For a moment, it appeared that an off ramp was emerging. At 10 pm, Naravane called Rajnath and Doval to relay this message.

Ten minutes later, Northern Command rang again. The Chinese tanks had not stopped. They were now only five hundred metres from the top. Naravane recalls Joshi saying that the "only way to stop them was by opening up with our medium artillery, which he said was ready and waiting." Artillery duels were routine on the Line of Control with Pakistan, where divisional and corps commanders had been delegated the authority to fire hundreds of rounds per day without asking anyone up the chain. But this was China. This was different. An artillery duel with the PLA could escalate into something far larger.

"My position was critical," Naravane writes. He was caught between "the Government who wanted to open fire with all possible means" and a committee which had "which had yet to give me clear-cut executive orders." In the operations room at army headquarters, options were being considered and discarded. The entire Northern Front was on high alert. Areas of likely clash were being monitored. But the decision point was at Rechin La.

Naravane made yet another call to the defence minister, who promised to call back. Time stretched. Each minute was a minute closer to Chinese tanks reaching the top. Rajnath called back at 10.30 pm. He had spoken to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose instructions consisted of a single...

(Beyond the screenshot:

...sentence: “Jo uchit samjho, woh karo”—do whatever you deem appropriate. This was to be “purely a military decision.” Modi had been consulted. He had been briefed. But he had declined to make the call. “I had been handed a hot potato,” Naravane recalls. “With this carte blanche, the onus was now totally on me.")

An Explainer:

I. This screenshot refers to the tense military standoff on the night of 31 August 2020 in the Rechin La / Rezang La area on the Kailash Range (south of Pangong Tso) in eastern Ladakh. This was part of the broader 2020 India–China border crisis along the LAC.

Here, it bears mentioning, the Indian Prime Minister, earlier on in an all-party meeting, in the immediate aftermath of the Galwan Valley clash of 15–16 June 2020, where 20 Indian soldiers were killed in hand-to-hand fighting, had, as a part of his briefing, emphatically asserted: "Na koi wahan hamari seema mein ghus aaya hai aur nahi koi ghusa hua hai, na hi hamari koi post kisi dusre ke kabze mein hain" (translated: "Neither has anyone entered our border nor is anyone there now, nor have our posts been captured"). In English versions reported by agencies: "Nobody has intruded into our border, neither is anybody there now, nor have our posts been captured."

II. Essentially two arguments have been put across to justify the gagging:

AA. Rahul Gandhi was trying to read out from an unpublished book, i.e. a book doesn't exist.

BB. One is not allowed to read out from a book.

The former one is just a flat lie.

Rahul Gandhi had very much in his hand a published document, i.e. the said copy of the Caravan Magazine. He also categorically authenticated it.

As regards the latter one, the very following day, i.e. yesterday, a BJP leader, Nishikant Dubey was doing the very same ref : <https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/a-book-for-a-book-nishikant-dubey-excerpts-on-gandhis-spark-priyanka-gandhi-counter-2863093-2026-02-04>). The Speaker had had just no problem.

Hence the justification for the gagging is essentially farcical and fabricated for this particular occasion only.

P.S.: The 2026 row has also highlighted the mechanism of "digital disappearance." Hours after Rahul Gandhi displayed a copy of the book in the Lok Sabha and quoted from the Caravan article, searches on major e-commerce platforms like Amazon and Flipkart showed that the listing for Four Stars of Destiny had either been removed or marked as "currently unavailable".

(Ref.: <https://m.economictimes.com/news/india/mm-naravanes-book-four-stars-of-destiny-cited-by-rahul-gandhi-disappears-from-online-platforms/articleshow/127903457.cms>.)

Peace Is Doable