The Congress on July 7 announced that it will move the Supreme Court after the Gujarat High Court refused to stay Rahul Gandhi’s conviction in the Modi surname case and pointed out that no court had ever handed out the maximum punishment in the 162-year history of the Indian Penal Code.
The party said that the High Court order was “disappointing” but not “unexpected”. Alleging that the repeated cases against Mr. Gandhi by BJP functionaries were an attempt to “throttle” his voice, the party promised to “redouble its resolve to fight the battle both legally and politically”.
“Why is that all cases filed against @RahulGandhi are by members of the BJP ecosystem?” Congress communication chief Jairam Ramesh tweeted.
“The whole purpose of the ‘defamation’ case against Mr Rahul Gandhi was to disqualify him from Parliament. Everything that followed is an attempt to justify the disqualification,” former Finance Minister P Chidambaram alleged on Twitter.
“Let me repeat what I had said earlier: In the 162 years the Indian Penal Code has been in force, there has been no case of slander (verbal defamation) where a court has imposed the maximum punishment of 2 years. That fact says all about the case and the judgement of the Trial Court. One day, justice will be delivered,” he added.
Addressing a press conference at the All India Congress Committee (AICC) headquarters, Congress spokesperson and Senior Advocate Abhishek Singhvi said, “People can see what is happening and how an entire cottage industry has been unleashed against one individual.”
“The matter was heard on April 29 and May 2. The judgment was reserved for orders and it is pronounced after 66 days,” he pointed out, adding, “In my humble opinion, this jurisprudence that the courts in question are evolving is, for want of a better word, unique. It has no precedent or parallel with any other judgments ever passed on the subject of defamation laws.”
Mr. Singhvi, who argued before the Gujarat High Court, said the basic premise of the defamation law is that it allows only the person who is defamed to move court and “not an amorphous, undefinable community”. Further, other essential requirements like malice and damage to the complaints didn’t exist in Mr. Gandhi’s case, he added.
“I will not reiterate the gymnastics that took place at the stage of trial, where the complainant got a one-year stay on his own complaint, and then revived it after there was a change on the Bench. And, it was that second magistrate, who proceeded to pass that order of conviction. Those are facts, and the facts speak for themselves,” he said.
Stating that the party will move the top court, Mr. Singhvi said, “In Supreme Court, we say that an error perpetuated three times needs correction all the more.”
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge took to Twitter to allege that the BJP has used “lies” as part of a political conspiracy to get Mr. Gandhi suspended from Parliament and asserted that the Congress leader has been fighting for the truth and will continue his fight.
“...Rahul ji is a fierce voice that takes the Modi government head-on. No force can silence him, the truth will triumph and justice will ultimately prevail,” party general (organisation) K.C. Venugopal said.
While a few Pradesh Congress Committees (PCC) protested on Friday, the Congress plans to observe a maun satyagraha on July 12 in front of Mahatma Gandhi statues across the country.
Quoting samar shesh hai...(battle is yet to be over) by Ramdhari Singh ‘Dinkar’, party general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra mounted a scathing attack on the Narendra Modi government.
“Rahul Gandhi is fighting the battle for truth and people’s interests against this arrogant regime,” she said, adding, “The arrogant regime is trying every trick in the book to suppress the truth, it is adopting all means — ‘saam, daam, dand, bhed, chal, kapat (money, power, punishment, discrimination, deceit)‘ — to distract from questions related to the interests of the public”.
