New Delhi: The Congress Friday said that Gujarat High Court’s judgment upholding senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s conviction in a criminal defamation case for his remarks on the ‘Modi’ surname is “disappointing but not unexpected”. The party added it will move Supreme Court against the HC order.
Addressing a press conference at the party headquarters in Delhi, Congress MP and party spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi said: “The jurisprudence found in the judgment is unique and extraordinary. It has no parallel or precedent in the jurisprudence of the law of defamation.”
In 2019, at an election rally in Karnataka’s Kolar, Rahul Gandhi had said, “Why all the thieves, be it Nirav Modi, Lalit Modi or Narendra Modi, have Modi as the common surname?”
On 23 March this year, a sessions court convicted Rahul Gandhi and sentenced him to two years imprisonment hearing a case filed on the complaint of Gujarat BJP MLA and former state minister Purnesh Modi. Gandhi was also disqualified as a Lok Sabha member following the judgment.
The Gujarat HC Friday dismissed Rahul Gandhi’s plea seeking a stay on his conviction.
Singhvi said that a series of complaints filed against the former Congress president, including this one in Gujarat, is an “orchestrated political campaign” to curb free speech, free thought and free expression.
Criticising the verdict, he said it has “no precedent in the law of defamation in India anywhere…”
Singhvi also said that Rahul Gandhi will be going to the apex court. However, he refused to give a time frame for the same.
“We have full faith in the judiciary and, in particular, in the apex court. We have no doubt that this intersection of arrogance and infallibility shown by the government of the day and the ruling party of the day will be dealt with properly in the Supreme Court,” Singh said targeting the BJP.
Speaking to ANI Friday, BJP MP Ravi Shankar Prasad said, “If Rahul Gandhi feels he has got the license to abuse anyone, then the court will take its course. I outrightly condemn Congress party’s comment that this is part of a conspiracy to frame Rahul Gandhi leading to his conviction…. He made an irresponsible comment. OBC community was insulted…the court gave him a chance to apologise…he did not and thereafter he suffered the trial….”
Mention of Savarkar ‘sad & illegal’
In the judgment delivered, it reads, “…as many as ten criminal cases are pending against the applicant (Rahul Gandhi). It is now need of the hour to have purity in politics. Representatives of people should be man of clear antecedent.”
The judgment added, “It also appears from the record that after filing of the said complaint, another complaints came to be filed against the present accused, out of which, one complaint was filed by the grandson of Vir Sawarkar (sic) in concerned Court of Puna when the accused used defamation utterances against Vir Sawarkar (sic) at Cambridge and another complaint was also filed in concerned Court of Lucknow.”
Responding to the mention of the Veer Savarkar case in the judgment, Singhvi, who is also Rahul Gandhi’s lawyer in the case, called it “sad and illegal”.
“It’s against all canons of decision-making to bring in extraneous facts like this, thrown across the bar, in a press cutting on the last day (of hearing),” he said.
At the press meet, Singhvi said Modis are an “undefined, amorphous, group”.
“How on earth can any member of this group… get up and have the locus to claim defamation,” he said, adding that the judgment fails to answer this “core question”.
On the multiple complaints that the court mentioned, Singhvi clarified that in all those cases Gandhi is still an accused.
“This (series of complaints) is a much larger issue. How these (are) desperate, blatant and open attempts to throttle the arena of free speech. Whether it is a political leader or journalist, the idea is to throttle your free expression, free thought and free statement,” he added.
(Edited by Anumeha Saxena)
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