Gohil adamant about filing criminal case and defamation suit against CM Rupani if he doesn’t tender apology

Bhavnagar: Rejecting DyCM Nitin Patel’s claim that CM Vijay Rupani never alleged him (Gohil) by name Senior Congress leader, party spokesperson and ex-MLA Shaktisinh Gohil today reiterated that if Rupani did not tender apology to him in stipulated 2 weeks time for his remarks alleging him for fueling the violence against non-Gujaratis then he would file a criminal case along with civil defamation suit against him.

He said that it was not correct to say that Rupani had never named him. Talking to newsmen here today Shaktisinh said that DyCM Nitin Patel was trying to save Rupani with lame-duck explanation. ‘He is saying that Rupani never uttered my name but I have the video footage in which he referred to Bihar Congress in-charge(Rupani had actually used this term for Alpesh Thakor,a Congress MLA who is AICC secretary for Bihar) and there is one and only one in-charge of Bihar which is me. Also in various newspapers there were reports with my name as his quote,’ Gohil said.

He said that Rupani should himself explain the things and the only situation when he would not proceed with his legal steps for defamation and criminal case would be if the CM expresses apology for it.

Notably, Patel had yesterday said that the so-called ‘ultimatum’ of Gohil to file defamation suit against CM Vijay Rupani was nothing but a publicity stunt.

‘Despite the fact that CM Rupani has not uttered anything about Gohil in his statement about violence against non-Gujaratis, he was at his own giving distorted statement. In fact a competition of sorts between leaders of Congress was going on to create meaningless issues as they don’t have any genuine issue to somehow grab media attention. It is a part of that,’ Patel had said.

Gohil, who is deemed close to Rahul Gandhi, had issued ultimatum to CM Rupani during a press conference at Congress state headquarter in Ahmedabad on October 16.
To a query as to whether there were back channel attempts from ruling BJP to resolve the issue, Gohil said that in such legal matters things work differently.

DeshGujarat