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Centre wants to silence Rahul: Congress; Habitual offender, says BJP
The Congress on Friday maintained that the Gujarat high court’s decision to uphold party leader Rahul Gandhi’s conviction in a 2019 criminal defamation case was “not unexpected”.
The Congress on Friday maintained that the Gujarat high court’s decision to uphold party leader Rahul Gandhi’s conviction in a 2019 criminal defamation case was “not unexpected”, and that the legal jurisprudence received from the state’s sessions court and high court is unique as it does not have any parallel or precedence in the defamation law.
The BJP, however, welcomed the high court verdict and criticised Gandhi’s “irresponsible arrogance”, calling him a “habitual offender”.
Senior Congress leader Abhishek Singhvi, who appeared for Gandhi in the high court, said the “core legal issue is that how on earth can anyone from an undefined, amorphous group of 10-13 crore people get up and have locus to claim defamation” — an argument that hasn’t given the Congress any leeway in the legal battle so far.
Although Singhvi said that Gandhi will soon move the Supreme Court, the high court verdict makes it nearly impossible for the former Congress chief to get a stay on the conviction before the monsoon session of Parliament from July 20.
Gandhi’s legal team, comprising party’s in-house legal experts, also has to get at least a stay on the conviction in the next 10 months to allow Gandhi to contest the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. “The core legal issue is how on earth can anyone from an undefined, amorphous group of 10-13 crore people get up and have locus to claim defamation. Without answering this core question, the court appears to hold indirectly that anybody can claim to have been defamed without showing any personal loss or damage and without showing how Shri Rahul Gandhi has shown malice, which is an essential ingredient of this offence of defamation, Singhvi said.
He claimed that the justification given in the judgment “does not address these issues at all”. “The malice appears to be with the class which is filing diverse complaints across the country. All the complainants are part of an orchestrated attempt – each one of them is an office-bearer of BJP. So, clearly it is an orchestrated political campaign. Therefore, this shows a clear motivated pattern… far from showing any malice on the part of the accused,” he said.
Even as Gandhi’s lawyers’ arguments failed to convince the three courts — the trial court, sessions court and the high court, Singhvi said: “There is a rightful phrase in the Supreme Court when matters come after four negative orders, not two... they say an error perpetuated three times or four times needs correction. All the more, an error perpetuated three times needs correction all the more. So repetition of the error is not a virtue in itself.”
Singhvi said: “We are seeing this cycle of oppression and suppression play out once again. We will fight it. Rahul Gandhi will fight it. And if in the last nine years, we see they always tried to silence his vigilant voice.”
The BJP, however, hit back. “If he behaves like this and defames people and institutions, the law will catch up with him,” BJP leader and former Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad told a press conference. It has become a “chronic habit” of Gandhi to abuse and defame eminent people and organisations, he said.
“I want to ask the Congress why can’t it control Gandhi and train him to speak right? When given a chance by the trial court in Surat to apologise, he instead said, ‘I am not Savarkar that I will apologise’. This truly shows the extent of hatred Rahul has against a great patriot of the country.”
A metropolitan magistrate’s court in Surat on March 23 had convicted and sentenced Gandhi to two years in prison in a criminal defamation case for a remark he made about the Modi surname ahead of the 2019 elections. Gandhi was disqualified as Lok Sabha MP from Kerala’s Wayanad on March 24. On April 3, Gandhi filed an appeal before the sessions court and was subsequently granted bail till the disposal of his plea. On April 20, the court rejected his plea for a stay on his conviction, prompting him to move the high court.
