In a setback to former Congress president Rahul Gandhi, the Gujarat High Court on Friday declined to stay his conviction in a criminal defamation case in which he was sentenced to two years in jail by a Surat court. The High Court noted that the Congress leader used Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s name in his speech at a poll rally to “add sensation” and with an intention to “affect the result” of the 2019 Lok Sabha election. “The accused did not stop there but imputed that ‘saare choro ke naam Modi hi kyu hai (why do all thieves have the Modi surname in common)’. Thus, the present case would certainly fall within the category of seriousness of the offence,” the order said. The Congress said it will move the Supreme Court against the order. The court underlined that Mr. Gandhi faced as many as 10 criminal cases across the country, including one filed by the grandson of V.D. Savarkar, and held that “it is now the need of the hour to have purity in politics”. The case relates to Mr. Gandhi’s remarks while campaigning for the 2019 Lok Sabha election in Karnataka. The High Court upheld the Surat Sessions Court’s ruling in which Mr. Gandhi’s plea seeking a stay on his conviction was rejected. The Surat court’s ruling led to his disqualification as a member of the Lok Sabha.
Justice Hemant Prachchhak, who dismissed the plea, held that the trial court’s sentence of a two-year jail term was “just, proper and legal”. He noted that a stay on a conviction is not the rule, but an exception reserved for rare cases only, and held that the present case did not fall into that category. “He [Mr. Gandhi] was trying to stay the conviction on absolutely non-existent grounds. It is a well-settled principle of law that staying of conviction is not a rule, but an exception, resorted only in rare cases. Disqualification is not only limited to MPs, MLAs. Moreover, as many as 10 criminal cases are pending against the applicant,” the HC noted in the judgment. The Congress said that no court had handed out the maximum punishment under defamation law in the 162-year history of the Indian Penal Code. The court disagreed with Mr. Gandhi’s submission that the offence for which he was convicted was not serious, with the judge noting that his conviction was a “serious matter affecting a large segment of the society and needs to be viewed by this court with the gravity and significance it commands”. The court maintained that it was not an “individual-centric defamation case”, but something which affected a “large section of the society”. With the Gujarat High Court holding that the ‘Modi’ community or surname is a “well-defined identifiable and suable class,” the fight for relief for Mr. Gandhi in the Supreme Court will revolve around the question whether the term ‘Modi’ is an identifiable and definite group or collection of persons.
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