New Delhi: The Supreme Court ordered an interim stay in a defamation lawsuit involving Congress leader Rahul Gandhi over alleged remarks he made about Union Home Minister Amit Shah in 2018.
A bench comprising Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta paused the defamation proceedings while hearing Gandhi’s appeal against a high court order rejecting his petition to quash proceedings against him in a trial court in connection with the complaint.
Naveen Jha, a BJP worker, filed the case against Gandhi in 2019 for his alleged remarks against Shah.
Senior Advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi, representing Gandhi, argued that defamation complaints cannot be filed by proxy and emphasised that only an “aggrieved person” has the legal standing to initiate such cases.
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Background of the case
The defamation case stems from Rahul Gandhi’s remarks made on 18 March, 2018, during a plenary session of the All India Congress Committee (AICC).
In his speech, Gandhi reportedly referred to Amit Shah, the BJP president at the time, as being implicated in a murder case. The complainant, Navin Jha, a BJP leader from Chhattisgarh, said the comments were defamatory to Shah, the BJP and its supporters.
According to the allegations, Gandhi described the BJP leadership as “liars drunk with power” and accused the party of accepting an individual “accused of murder” as its president.
Gandhi contrasted this with the Congress, saying the party would not accept such a person.
Jha claimed these remarks harmed the image and character of the BJP and its leaders.
Legal journey and lower court orders
A magistrate’s court initially dismissed Jha’s suit against Gandhi. Jha subsequently filed a revision petition with the Judicial Commissioner in Ranchi, who overturned the magistrate court’s ruling and asked it to “re-appreciate the evidence available on the record” and issue a new order assessing prima facie material to proceed in the matter.
The magistrate court then passed a fresh order, finding the prima facie case to be true under Section 500 (defamation) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). Gandhi challenged the “legality, correctness, and propriety” of the Judicial Commissioner’s 15 September 2018 order in the Jharkhand High Court.
However, the high court rejected his plea to quash the case, saying his imputation was prima facie defamatory. It added it did not find any illegality in the order of the Judicial Commissioner and the magistrate court’s fresh order.
Challenge in the Supreme Court
Gandhi, seeking to avoid trial proceedings, approached the Supreme Court, challenging the Jharkhand High Court decision to dismiss his plea for quashing the defamation case.
Gandhi raised several arguments in the petition.
He said Jha, as a BJP member, lacked the legal capacity to file a defamation complaint as such cases can only be submitted by the “aggrieved person”. Moreover, the statements were political and protected by the Indian Constitution’s free speech clause, he added.
In the Special Leave Petition (SLP), Gandhi challenged the judicial commissioner’s interference and argued that the defamation suit was improperly filed by a third party.
A key point highlighted in Gandhi’s appeal was that the complainant was not an “aggrieved person” as defined under Section 199(1) of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) as the complainant has not been able to establish that he is a member of the BJP.
The complaint ambiguously describes himself as a “worker/supporter” and does not say he is an official party member. Moreover, there is no evidence to establish his membership even after the complaint, during the inquiry proceedings under Section 202 of the CrPC.
Gandhi’s petition argued that the sub-divisional judicial magistrate’s 2018 order, which found no case against the petitioner after due inquiry, was well-reasoned and should not have been overturned.
The plea contended that the courts had wrongly focused on the absence of the term “prima facie” and failed to properly assess the evidence, which only raised “suspicion” and not “grave suspicion”.
It claimed the statements described as defamatory in the complaint are protected by the constitutional right to political speech, exempting them from defamation laws.
Allowing such proceedings to continue would be an abuse of legal resources, Gandhi said while seeking the top court’s intervention to quash the proceedings, arguing that it is based on insufficient evidence and violates constitutional rights.
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)
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