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New Delhi: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi suffered a legal setback Friday as the Gujarat High Court dismissed his plea against his conviction in a criminal defamation case over a “Modi surname” remark.
Gandhi was sued and received a two-year sentence this March for a pre-poll comment in 2019 wherein he had asked at a rally if all those with the Modi surname were thieves.
Gandhi, therefore, will remain disqualified from the Lok Sabha, but will not go to jail as his sentence has been put on hold by a lower court.
The Congress leader now has the option of moving the Supreme Court for a stay on his conviction.
In the Gujarat High Court in April, Gandhi’s counsel Abhishek Manu Singhvi had argued that two years in jail for a “bailable, non-cognisable offence” meant the leader would lose his Lok Sabha seat “permanently and irreversibly”. Singhvi said this would have a “very serious additional irreversible consequence to the person and the constituency he represents”.
According to a 2013 Supreme Court ruling, an MP stands disqualified if they are sentenced to two years or more in prison.
The 52-year-old was convicted and sentenced to two years by a magistrate’s court in Gujarat on 23 March for comments he made during the 2019 Lok Sabha campaign.
BJP MLA and former Gujarat minister Purnesh Modi filed a case after Rahul Gandhi said at the Kolar rally: “Nirav Modi, Lalit Modi, Narendra Modi… how come they all have Modi as common surname? How come all the thieves have the common surname Modi?”
The Congress leader, who was the Lok Sabha MP from Wayanad in Kerala, was disqualified the very next day of his conviction.
He challenged the order in a sessions court in Surat, along with an application seeking a stay on the conviction.
The Surat court granted him bail on 20 April till the pendency of the case but refused to stay the conviction. Gandhi moved the high court five days later.
On Friday, High Court Justice Hemant Prachchak observed that Gandhi was seeking a stay on absolutely “non-existential grounds”. “Stay on conviction is not a rule. As many as 10 cases are pending against (Gandhi). It is needed to have purity in politics… A complaint has been filed against (Gandhi) by the grandson of Veer Savarkar in a Pune court after Gandhi used terms against Veer Savarkar in Cambridge… Refusal to stay conviction would not in any way result in injustice to the applicant. There are no reasonable grounds to stay conviction. The conviction is just, proper and legal,” the judge added.
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