An Indian-American lawyer representing the Congress party has accused a Sikh group of resorting to improper practices while filing lawsuits in the U.S. against leaders like Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh over the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.
Lawyer Ravi Batra said Sikhs for Justice (SFJ) had indulged in “improper judge-and-venue-shopping” while filing lawsuits against the leaders in several federal courts.
Mr. Batra said in a statement filed in the court of the Eastern District of New York that contrary to the SFJ claims, Ms. Gandhi was not served court summons during her reported treatment at Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital here last month.
According to the statement, a security manager at the hospital has said Ms. Gandhi had not been served with the lawsuit by hospital staff.
“Three men came in the middle of the night and started throwing papers on every nursing station on all five floors, saying ‘you have been served.’
Nobody picked them up,” said the manager.
He also said the SFJ had “wholly failed to alert the respective federal district courts of the prior pending and related cases,” when they commenced the related action against Ms. Gandhi and related identical actions against Mr. Singh in the court of District of Columbia and the Southern District of New York.
Appearing as counsel for Ms. Gandhi, Mr. Batra said the Congress leader “reserves all of her rights to contest any assertion of jurisdiction or attempts by plaintiffs to pursue this matter, including, by way of motion to dismiss for a lack of subject-matter jurisdiction, lack of personal jurisdiction for insufficient process, insufficient service of process.”
