As India celebrated the 78th Independence Day from the Red Fort, a notable moment occurred when Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi was seen sitting in the fifth row among Olympic medallists.
Though this year, it marked the first time in a decade that a Leader of the Opposition attended the Red Fort celebrations, Rahul Gandhi was pushed backed to fifth row, which was noticed in the last ten years as he held no constitutional position except being a Congress MP.
According to protocol, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, who holds a rank equivalent to that of a Cabinet Minister, is traditionally assigned a seat in the front row.
However, the protocol was ignored when it was decided to seat the Olympic medallists in the front, leading to Rahul Gandhi's placement further back. The Ministry of Defence, which oversees the Independence Day event and seating arrangements, clarified that while the LoP's protocol was pushed back to honor the athletes instead.
In previous Congress or BJP administrations, such as under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the then Leader of the Opposition, Sonia Gandhi, was consistently given a front-row seat.
Since 2014, the position of Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha has been unoccupied because no party has met the requirement of holding at least one-tenth of the seats in the 543-member House.
In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, Congress won 99 seats, but the NDA retained power with a reduced mandate as TDP and JD(U) joined the NDA alliance. In the 2014 and 2019 elections, Congress won 44 and 52 seats respectively, falling short of the threshold required for the Leader of the Opposition role.
