New Delhi: Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi has petitioned the Supreme Court to quash a 2022 defamation case filed against him over his alleged derogatory remarks on freedom fighter Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.
In November 202, Rahul Gandhi, during his Bharat Jodo Yatra, allegedly passed defamatory comments on Savarkar at a rally in Maharashtra’s Akola.
As per the causelist published on the website of the apex court, a bench of Justices Dipankar Datta and Manmohan will take up the plea of the Rae Bareli MP for hearing on April 25.
Earlier, the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court had declined to exercise its inherent powers in favour of Rahul Gandhi, who had sought the quashing of the entire legal proceedings. A single-judge Bench of Justice Subhash Vidyarthi, in its order passed on April 4, said that Rahul Gandhi had the statutory remedy of filing a revision against the lower court order summoning him to face trial for the offences under Sections 153-A and 505 of the now-repealed Indian Penal Code (IPC).
“As the petitioner has got a statutory remedy of filing a revision under Section 397/399 Cr.P.C. this court does not find it a fit case warranting exercise of its inherent powers under Section 482 Cr.P.C.,” the Allahabad HC said.
Under the IPC, 1860, Section 153-A addressed the offence of “promoting enmity between different groups based on religion, race, caste, etc.” and Section 505 dealt with “statements conducing to public mischief”.
In January this year, the Supreme Court, in an interim order, had directed the halting of trial court proceedings in a defamation case filed by a BJP worker against Rahul Gandhi over the latter’s alleged defamatory remarks against Union Home Minister Amit Shah. During one of his public speeches in Jharkhand’s Chaibasa before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Rahul Gandhi had called Shah a “murder accused”. In August 2023, the Supreme Court stayed the conviction of Rahul Gandhi in the ‘Modi surname’ defamation case, which had cost him his then Lok Sabha membership, saying that no reasons were given by the trial judge for imposing the maximum punishment of two years in the case.
Following the apex court’s stay order, the Lok Sabha Secretariat restored his membership in Parliament on August 7, 2023. Rahul Gandhi was disqualified as an MP in March 2023 after a Surat court convicted him and sentenced him to two years in prison for his “How come all thieves have Modi as the common surname” remark made during an election rally in Karnataka in April 2019. His remark was interpreted as an attempt to draw an implicit connection between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and fugitive businessmen Nirav Modi and Lalit Modi.
(IANS)
