Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Monday afternoon filed an appeal against his conviction last month by a sessions court in Gujarat’s Surat in the ‘Modi surname’ criminal defamation case, after which he was disqualified from the Lok Sabha and evicted from his allotted Delhi bungalow.
Rahul Gandhi was accompanied by general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, the chief ministers of the three states the party rules independently, i.e, Rajasthan (Ashok Gehlot), Chhattisgarh (Bhupesh Baghel) and Himachal Pradesh (Sukvinder Singh Sukhu).
“We are confident the appeals court will appreciate blatant errors of (the) trial court and do justice expeditiously,” Rajya Sabha MP Abhishek Singhvi, the Congress leader supervising and advising Rahul Gandhi’s legal team, said earlier in the day.
Last month the court in prime minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat held Gandhi guilty of criminal defamation over a remark made before the 2019 election, and sentenced him to two years in prison. The sentence was suspended immediately and the ex-Congress chief was given bail – on the request of his legal team – so an appeal could be lodged.
The Surat court’s guilty verdict is crucial not just from the point of view of optics, but also because the disqualification means Rahul Gandhi cannot contest an election for eight years, ruling him out of the 2024 Lok Sabha poll unless the conviction and sentence are stayed.
The case was filed after a complaint by BJP MLA (and then Gujarat minister) Purnesh Modi.
The guilty verdict and the disqualification from Parliament (as well as the eviction) triggered a furious political squabble betweent the Congress and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
Significantly, several other opposition parties – including Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool and K Chandrashekhar Rao’s Bharat Rashtra Samithi, neither of whom have cordial relations with Rahul Gandhi’s party – united to support him and the Congress against the BJP. Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party and Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party have also backed Gandhi.
