The Allahabad High Court on Thursday dismissed a petition seeking disqualification of Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi from the Lok Sabha [Ashok Pandey v. Rahul Gandhi & Ors.]
The petition, filed by advocate Ashok Pandey, sought Gandhi's removal from Lok Sabha on the ground that he was disqualified from being a Member of Parliament (MP) due to his conviction by a Gujarat court in a defamation case.
However, the Court noted that the conviction was stayed by the Supreme Court in August 2023.
A Bench of Justice Shekhar B Saraf and Justice Manjive Shukla stated that once a conviction is stayed, the disqualification under Section 8(3) does not operate.
"We are of the view that no substantial question of law arises in the present matter, as the matter has been categorically settled by the Supreme Court and is no longer res integra (not bound by prior decisions)," the Court held.
Gandhi was elected as MP from Rae Bareli constituency in Uttar Pradesh in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
In the petition, Pandey claimed that Rahul Gandhi was automatically disqualified under Section 8(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 after being found guilty and sentenced to two years' imprisonment by a Surat court in 2023 for defamation.
According to Pandey, the returning officer wrongly accepted Gandhi's nomination even though he was ineligible to contest the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
The Court disagreed with these claims.
The Bench said that Section 8(3) attaches disqualification only when a conviction is operative. A stay of conviction, the judges noted, prevents the legal consequences of that conviction from taking effect until the appeal is decided.
"The moment a higher court stays a conviction, the anathema of conviction goes out of the window and the person against whom such conviction is stayed, though not absolved, cannot be stated to be a convicted person," said the Court.
The Bench also distinguished between a stay of sentence and a stay of conviction, noting that only the latter removes the disqualification under the RP Act. In cases where only the sentence is suspended, the statutory bar will continue to apply, the Court made it clear.
Pandey had relied on the Supreme Court’s decision in BR Kapur vs. State of Tamil Nadu- 2001 to argue that a conviction continues to operate until it is set aside on appeal.
However, the High Court held that this reliance was misplaced. It pointed out that the BR Kapur case dealt with a situation where the sentence was stayed but not the conviction unlike the present case where the conviction itself had been stayed.
The petitioner also compared Gandhi’s case with that of Afzal Ansari 2023, arguing that the Supreme Court had expressly permitted Ansari to contest elections while his appeal was pending, but had not done so for Gandhi.
The Bench rejected this distinction, holding that the legal effect of a stay of conviction is the same irrespective of whether the apex court expressly mentions contesting elections.
The Court relied on the settled position laid down in the case of Lily Thomas v. Union of India to rule that a stayed conviction cannot trigger disqualification.
It stated that the question before it was already conclusively addressed by the Supreme Court and did not raise any new issue requiring reconsideration.
Hence, it proceeded to dismiss the plea.
Ashok Pandey appeared in person.
[Read Order]