Gujarat High Court on Friday cited various pending cases against Rahul Gandhi, including one for allegedly defaming Hindutva ideologue V.D. Savarkar, while explaining its decision not to stay the Congress leader’s conviction for criminal defamation over his “Modi surname” remark.

Referring to these cases, the single-judge bench of Justice Hemant Prachchhak observed: “It is now the need of the hour to have purity in politics. Representatives of people should be men of clear antecedent.”

The judge said Rahul faced 10 criminal cases across India and ruled that the trial court’s order handing him a two-year jail term in the present defamation case was “just, proper and legal”.

“He (Rahul) was trying to stay the conviction on absolutely non-existent grounds. It is a well-settled principle of law that staying of conviction is not a rule but an exception,” he said.

Justice Prachchhak underlined that after the present defamation complaint was filed in 2019, Savarkar’s grandson had filed another complaint in a Pune court over Rahul’s “defamatory utterance against Veer Savarkar at Cambridge”.

He added that a separate complaint against Rahul had been filed in a Lucknow court.

Against this backdrop, the refusal of a stay on conviction would not in any way result in injustice to the applicant, the judge said.

“The impugned order passed by the appellate court (in Surat) is just, proper and legal, and does not call for any interference. However, it is hereby requested the concerned learned district judge to decide the criminal appeal on its own merits and in accordance with law as expeditiously as possible,” the high court said.

Justice Prachchhakdisagreed with Rahul’s submission that the offence of which he had been convicted was not serious, saying it was a “serious matter affecting a large segment of the society and needs to be viewed by this court with the gravity and significance it commands”.

The court maintained that it was not an “individual-centric defamation case” but one that affected a “large section of the society”.

It referred to Rahul’s speech at a poll rally in April 2019 where he had asked why all thieves had the Modi surname, prompting Gujarat MLA and BJP leader Purnesh Modi to file the criminal defamation case.

The high court said: “That the accused was a member of Parliament, president of second-largest national-level political party and president of the party that ruled in the country for more than 50 years, who was giving a speech to the thousands of people and made a false statement in the election with clear intention to affect the result of the election.

“It appears the accused suggested the name of the Hon’ble Prime Minister to add sensation, apparently and for an intention to affect the result of the election of the candidate of the concerned constituency belonging to the political party of the Prime Minister.

“The accused did not stop there but imputed that ‘saare choro ke naam Modi hi kyu hai’. Thus, the present case would certainly fall within the category of seriousness of the offence. ”

PTI