Rahul to appeal against Surat verdict today
Gandhi, along with many senior leaders of his party, will be present at the Surat sessions court during the appeal, the party said on Sunday
The Congress’s legal team will move an appeal at a sessions court in Gujarat on Monday seeking a stay on the conviction of Rahul Gandhi in a criminal defamation case, which has led to the party’s former president to be disqualified as a member of Lok Sabha.
Gandhi, along with many senior leaders of his party, will be present at the Surat sessions court during the appeal, the party said on Sunday.
The former MP from Wayanad was disqualified from Lok Sabha on March 24, a day after the Surat court order, which also handed him a suspended two-year prison term.
“We are confident that the appeals court will appreciate blatant errors of trial court and do justice expeditiously,” said Rajya Sabha MP Abhishek Singhvi, who is supervising and advising the legal team on the appeal.
On behalf of Gandhi, senior counsel RS Cheema will appear in the court on Monday.
A senior Congress leader said that besides Singhvi and Cheema, former Union minister P Chidambaram’s advice has also been sought in this case. “At a meeting of the Congress Parliamentary Party, many MPs who have legal background started giving suggestions when it was announced that Singhvi will take all decisions and Chidambaram will also advise in this case,” said a senior leader, asking not to be named.
The party leaders said the legal team took more than a week to file the appeal as they wanted a foolproof case. “It took a lot of time to translate the Surat court’s order from Gujarati to English. It was not a random translation. The legal document, especially the court’s observations on certain provisions such as section 202 of the CrPC Act, will hold key to our argument,” said a senior leader.
The Congress general secretary for communication Jairam Ramesh said, “With more cases being filed against Gandhi in Patna or Ranchi, every word of our appeal to the sessions court assumes more significance. We need to be extra careful.”
Along with Gandhi, some senior leaders, including general secretary KC Venugopal, will be present at Surat, the official cited above said.
The Congress indicated the appeal will focus on two-three key issues to contest the conviction as well as the Lok Sabha secretariat’s disqualification order.
One of the key arguments will be on the jurisdiction of the Surat court to pass order on a case that relates to Gandhi’s speech in Karnataka’s Kolar in 2019. Last week, Singhvi quoted Section 202 of the CrPC (criminal procedure code) and said: “If allegedly I commit a defamatory offence in place ‘X’ and if somebody chooses to sue me in Gujarat or Bihar or as in this case, Surat, then the magistrate before whom a complaint is filed, is mandatorily, I repeat, mandatorily, obliged to conduct a preliminary inquiry as to whether he has jurisdiction to initiate the proceedings.”
The Congress’s legal team will maintain that as per Article 103 of the Constitution, the President of India, and not the Lok Sabha secretariat, can decide on the disqualification of an MP.
Article 103 laid down: “If any question arises as to whether a member of either House of Parliament has become subject to any of the disqualifications mentioned in clause (1) of Article 102, the question shall be referred for the decision of the President and his decision shall be final,” and “Before giving any decision on any such question, the President shall obtain the opinion of the Election Commission and shall act according to such opinion.”
The legal team is set to also point out the chain of events and the speed at which the case was decided. The original complaint was filed on April 16, 2019 but the complainant, Gujarat lawmaker Purnesh Modi, sought and got a stay on his own complaint from Gujarat High Court on March 7, 2022.
A Congress leader alleged that after Gandhi’s speech on the Adani-Hindenburg issue in Lok Sabha on February 7 this year, the complainant withdrew the stay from HC on February 16 and the Surat chief judicial magistrate resumed on arguments, with orders on March 23.
In a notification, the Lok Sabha secretariat said Gandhi had been disqualified from the day of the conviction under the Constitution’s Article 102(1)(e), read with Section 8 of the Representation of the People Act.
