Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi was acquitted by a court in Uttar Pradesh on Monday in a defamation case over his 2018 remarks referring to Union Home Minister Amit Shah as an accused in a murder case.
Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate Shubham Verma said the criminal complaint accusing the Congress leader of defaming the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its office-bearers was prima facie suspicious, unnatural and uncorroborated.
The judge added that the complaint appeared to have been filed merely for the sake of filing a complaint by hook or by crook and was motivated by political or other considerations.
The criminal defamation case under Sections 499 and 500 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) against Gandhi was filed by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Vinay Mishra in 2018.
According to the complainant, Gandhi, in a statement made during the Karnataka elections, had referred to Shah, who was then the national president of BJP, as a murder accused.
Gandhi had made the following statement in Bengaluru:
"People in India forget that the president of BJP is a murder accused. That's the truth. The party that talks about honesty, decency, has a person who has been accused of murder as president."
Here are three major reasons given by the Court to acquit Gandhi:
Political persons question each other's credibility during elections
The judge said that during elections, such statements are routinely made among political persons questioning each other's credibility.
"There is nothing unnatural in this; rather, it has been regarded as an indispensable feature of a healthy democracy," the Court said.
Threshold not met
The Court considered the settled legal position that defamation cases over statements made between political persons require a benchmark of a higher degree than ordinary cases.
Considering the context in which Gandhi had made the statement, the Court found that it did not meet the higher standard/higher degree threshold required by law in the context of political persons and parties so as to bring it within the category of defamation.
"It is also an important fact that the aforesaid statement was made by the president of one national political party concerning the president of another ruling national political party during the Karnataka Assembly election campaign. The person who filed the complaint, claiming to be aggrieved by the aforesaid statement, is himself an office-bearer of a political party. The persons who allegedly showed the video to the complainant, as well as the witnesses who were present at the place of the alleged incident when the video was shown, are also active members of the BJP, that is, the same political party. Thus, it is an established fact that all the persons connected with the present case, namely, the complainant, the witnesses, the alleged aggrieved person and the accused, belong to a political background," it noted.
No authorisation from BJP
The Court also noted that the statement in question was about Shah and not the complainant. It added that Mishra was not authorised to file the complaint.
It rejected his contention that all office-bearers or members of BJP could file cases over the statement made by Gandhi. The Court said that in a civilised society governed by the rule of law, any notion that supports multiplicity of litigation cannot be recognised by law.
"This is particularly impermissible in the context of criminal defamation proceedings, having regard to the provisions contained in Section 199 of the Code of Criminal Procedure," the Court said.