A special trial court has acquitted all 68 accused including former minister Maya Kodnani in the Naroda village massacre case of 2002 riots. Eleven Muslims were killed at Naroda Gam in north Ahmedabad during a shutdown called to protest against the Godhra train carnage.
Former Minister Maya Kodnani is among the 82 people facing trial. Kodnani served as the Women and Child Development Minister in the Cabinet of the then Gujarat CM Narendra Modi. The special designated court conducting the trial, in 2017, had summoned Union Home Minister Amit Shah to depose before the court as a defence witness to corroborate Kodnani’s statement.
In 2020, M.K. Dave, a special judge hearing the case of the Naroda Gam massacre, part of the 2002 riots, was transferred by the Gujarat High Court in a shuffle of district judicial officers.
Pakistan’s Bilawal Bhutto Zardari to attend SCO meet in India in May
Foreign Office spokesperson Mumtaz Zahrah Baloch announced it at a weekly media briefing in Islamabad.
“Bilawal Bhutto Zardari will be leading the Pakistan delegation to the SCO Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM) being held on May 4-5, 2023, in Goa, India,” she said, ending weeks-long speculation if he would attend the conference in-person.
She said the Pakistan Foreign Minister would be attending the meeting as External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar had invited him to attend the SCO meet.
“Our participation in the meeting reflects Pakistan’s commitment to the SCO Charter and processes and the importance that Pakistan accords to the region in its foreign policy priorities,” Baloch said.
“Now that this decision has been taken we will be making preparations for the visit. In the coming days as decisions are taken, will be making further announcements. I must underline, however, that the upcoming visit of the Foreign Minister is not a bilateral visit but a visit in SCO context,” a Pakistani Foreign Office spokesperson said.
It would be the highest-level visit to India by any Pakistani leader in recent years and a possible opportunity to break the ice between the two nations.
The ties between India and Pakistan came under severe strain after India’s warplanes pounded a Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist training camp in Pakistan’s Balakot in February 2019 in response to the Pulwama terror attack.
The relations further deteriorated after India announced the withdrawal of Jammu and Kashmir’s special powers and the bifurcation of the erstwhile State into Union Territories in August 2019.
The SCO was founded at a summit in Shanghai in 2001 by the presidents of Russia, China, the Kyrgyz Republic, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Over the years, it has emerged as one of the largest trans-regional international organisations. India and Pakistan became permanent members of the Beijing-based SCO in 2017.
Surat court rejects Rahul Gandhi’s petition seeking suspension of sentence in defamation case
Surat Sessions Court on April 20 dismissed Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s plea seeking to stay his conviction in a criminal defamation case in which he was sentenced to two years imprisonment.
On April 3, a sessions court in Surat granted bail to Gandhi after admitting his appeal challenging the conviction and sentencing in a defamation case filed by a BJP legislator over his 2019 remark about Modi surname.
The court also suspended the sentence till the disposal of the appeal filed by Gandhi. Gandhi has filed two applications, first for suspension of sentence, which is essentially an application for regular bail, and the second for suspension of conviction.
The Congress leader was convicted and sentenced in the case on March 23. He was disqualified as a member of Lok Sabha on March 24.
According to experts, if the conviction is stayed by the court, his Lok Sabha membership could potentially be restored. The court of additional district judge R.P. Mogera also issued notice to the complainant, Purnesh Modi, who filed the criminal defamation case after Gandhi said “all thieves have Modi surname” at a rally in Karnataka during the 2019 Lok Sabha election. The complainant has been asked to file a reply by April 10.
Congress spokesperson A.M. Singhvi in a media briefing in Delhi on April 20 said a “wrong decision has been reaffirmed”.
“We will appeal to Supreme Court and explore all other legal possibilities,” he said.
“The point is simple, a most unfortunate and unsustainable legal decision of the magistrate has been upheld in an even more erroneous judgement of the sessions court given today. The conviction has been upheld contrary to all basic and elementary principles of law.”
“The judgement will be challenged in near future in the High Court. We are confident, that superior courts with the constitutional power of judicial review, namely High Court and Supreme Court will set right the legal errors found in this judgement,” he said.
Gandhi’s lawyer Kirit Panwala also said the sessions court’s order will be challenged in Gujarat High Court. He said the sessions court has set May 20 as the date to begin hearing his appeal against the lower court’s March 23 order.
Dr. Singhvi added that Congress is clear that the “judgements are devoid of valid and sustainable legal reasoning”.
“The one-line remark of Rahul Gandhi in a two-and-a-half-page long speech has been from inception completely distorted out of recognition to serve narrow ends of motivated complainants.
“The BJP’s speed and zeal to act after the original order depicts that they are motivated by political animosity. Their misleading statements about the OBC community have backfired on them. And the whole community sees the BJP as misutilising and encashing the OBC community for narrow political gains,” he said.
He further said that the voice of Rahul Gandhi is not to be silenced in the manner BJP thinks it can do. “The BJP, in a sense, from Mr. Modi, to the government to the ruling party, is captured in a fear psychosis.”
SC implicitly contemplated ‘stable, marriage-like relationships’ between same-sex persons while decriminalising homosexuality
Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud on April 20 said the moment the Supreme Court gave a “rainbow of hope” to the LGBTQIA+ community by decriminalising homosexuality in 2018, it had implicitly contemplated that “stable, marriage-like relationships” could exist between same-sex persons who do not treat their bond as “chance encounters”.
“The moment we said homosexuality is no longer an offence under Section 377 [of the Indian Penal Code], we necessarily contemplated that there could be a stable, marriage-like relationship between two persons who do not treat these as chance encounters but as something more than that... That for them it is not just a physical relationship, but something like a stable emotional relationship,” Chief Justice Chandrachud observed during the third day of the Constitution Bench hearing of petitions seeking legal recognition of same-sex marriages.
The government had argued in an affidavit that the court had only decriminalised sexual intercourse between same-sex persons in its 2018 judgment in the Navtej Singh Johar case, and not legitimised this “conduct”. The court, while decriminalising homosexuality, had never accepted same-sex marriage as part of the fundamental right to life and dignity under Article 21 of the Constitution. The government had said a same-sex marriage cannot be compared to a man and woman living as a family with children born out of the union.
The petitioners have sought a broader interpretation of the Special Marriage Act of 1954 by making it gender-neutral and read the term ‘spouses’ into the heterosexual usages of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in the law.
Chief Justice Chandrachud said the Parliament’s intention behind introducing the 1954 Act was to open up an avenue for people who were not falling back or relying on the diktats of their respective personal laws to get married. Justice S. Ravindra Bhat described the 1954 Act as an “all-enfolding legislation”. “There was also a factor of addressing endogamy, which we cannot ignore,” Justice Bhat said.
“In the last 69 years, our law has evolved to recognise the fact when you decriminalise homosexuality, you also realise that these are not just one-off relationships. That these are also comprehensive and stable relationships. Therefore, by decriminalising homosexuality, we have not just recognised fleeting relationships between consenting adults of the same gender, we have also recognised implicitly the fact that people who are of the same sex would be in stable relationships,” Chief Justice Chandrachud said.
Justice Bhat indicated that the “concept” of marriage was not cast in stone. The court’s remarks serve as a counter to the arguments of the government that the existing concept of marriage as a heterosexual institution has the sanctity of law and religion. The Centre has warned that legal recognition of same sex marriage would “seriously affect the interests of every citizen”.
“The concept of marriage transcends contemporary understanding, used in a constitutional sense, marriage provides a framework, and the framework is evolving and not cast in stone,” Justice Bhat observed.
“It is an evolving and dynamic concept,” senior advocate A.M. Singhvi, appearing for a gay couple Utkarsh Saxena and Ananya Kotia.
However, adding a note of restraint, the court said it has to examine whether it was making policy choices, which was for the legislature to make, and whether it was doing something fundamentally contrary to the scheme of the 1954 Act. The government, in an affidavit, has argued that any further creation of rights, recognition of same-sex relationships and giving it legal sanctity could be done only by the competent legislature and not through judicial adjudication.
“Marriage is considered to be an aspect of social policy of the nation across the world. It is within the remit of the appropriate legislature, as the elected representatives of the people, to define it, recognise it and regulate it and the choice not to recognise same-sex marriage is simply a facet of the legislative policy,” the affidavit has said.
In an earlier affidavit, the Centre had found the idea of same-sex marriage a threat to the “holy union” of marriage between a biological man and a woman in India where the union is a “sacrament and a sanskar”.
Hindenburg-Adani row: Gautam Adani meets Sharad Pawar amid Opposition’s demand for JPC probe
Amid the Opposition’s demand for a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) probe into the Adani-Hindenburg issue, industrialist Gautam Adani on April 20 met Nationalist Congress Party supremo Sharad Pawar at the latter’s Silver Oak residence in Mumbai. The meeting reportedly lasted for over two hours.
Earlier this month, Pawar had come out in support of the Adani Group and criticised the narrative around the U.S. short seller Hindenburg Research’s report on the conglomerate.
Taking a position at variance from senior ally Congress, Pawar had said he favoured a Supreme Court committee to probe allegations against the Adani Group since the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would have a majority in the JPC based on numerical strength in Parliament and this would lead to doubts on such a probe.
The NCP supremo had later said although his outfit does not agree with the demand of anti-BJP parties for a JPC probe into allegations against the Adani Group, it will not go against their stand for the sake of Opposition unity.
The Supreme Court had last month ordered the setting up of a six-member committee headed by a former apex court judge to look into various regulatory aspects for stock markets, including the recent Adani Group shares crash triggered by Hindenburg Research’s fraud allegations.
The Hindenburg Research has made a litany of allegations, including fraudulent transactions and share-price manipulation, against the business conglomerate. The Adani Group has dismissed the charges as lies, saying it complies with all laws and disclosure requirements.
In Brief:
The Common University Entrance Test-PG for admission to postgraduate programmes in universities across the country will be conducted from June 5-12, the National Testing Agency announced on April 20. Candidates can apply for the exam till May 5. The application deadline earlier was April 19. “Common University Entrance Test [CUET]-[PG] will be conducted on June 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12, 2023. Candidates are advised to regularly visit the NTA [National Testing Agency] website for the latest updates regarding the examination, a senior official said.
Evening Wrap will return tomorrow.
