India, Feb. 27 -- Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Thursday strongly criticised the police action against his party's youth wing activists over the "shirtless protest", drawing a sharp parallel between the Government and the authoritarian regime in North Korea.

"This is India, not North Korea," Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, said in a social media post in Hindi and asserted that peaceful protest is the soul of democracy and not a crime.

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, Rahul Ga...