A court in Uttar Pradesh's Sultanpur on Monday acquitted Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi in a defamation case over his 2018 remarks referring to Union Home Minister Amit Shah as an accused in a murder case.
Gandhi was present before the court at the time of the pronouncement of the verdict by Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate Shubham Verma.
The Court today said that the remarks made by Gandhi were not defamatory in nature.
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 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."
Gandhi was referring to the Sohrabuddin encounter case, in which Shah was discharged by a special CBI court in 2014.
In 2023, Gandhi was convicted and sentenced to two years' imprisonment by a Gujarat court in another defamation case for his remark "all thieves have Modi surname". The statement linking Prime Minister Narendra Modi with fugitives like Nirav Modi and Lalit Modi was made at an election rally in Karnataka's Kolar constituency in 2019.
Gandhi, who was then a member of parliament from Wayanad, had been disqualified from parliament after his conviction in the case. However, the conviction was later stayed by the Supreme Court – the interim order enabled him to continue to be a lawmaker.
Senior Advocate RS Cheema with advocates Kashi Shukla, Tarannum Cheema, Prasanna S and Akash Singh represented Gandhi.