New Delhi: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has moved the Supreme Court to challenge the Gujarat High Court’s July 7 ruling that dismissed his plea for a stay on his conviction in a defamation case related to his “Modi surname” remark.

Gandhi’s appeal was filed through advocate on record Prasanna S.

On March 24, 2023, Gandhi was disqualified as a Member of Parliament after a Gujarat court convicted him and sentenced him to a two-year imprisonment for criminal defamation over his comments about the Modi surname.

Rejecting his plea for a stay on his conviction, Justice Hemant Prachchhak of Gujarat High Ccourt, in his verdict, stated that representatives of the people should have a “clear antecedent” and that a stay on conviction is an exception rather than a rule, reserved for rare cases. The judge concluded that there were no reasonable grounds to stay the conviction.

The 125-page verdict also highlighted that Gandhi faced 10 criminal cases across India and deemed the lower court’s order of a two-year jail term as “just, proper, and legal” considering his remarks. The court emphasized that it was not an “individual-centric defamation case” but one that affected a “large section of society.”

Purnesh Modi, a former Gujarat minister, had filed a criminal defamation case in 2019 against Gandhi for his remark, “How come all thieves have Modi as the common surname?” made during an election rally in Kolar, Karnataka, on April 13, 2019.

After being sentenced by a metropolitan magistrate’s court in Surat on March 23, Gandhi, who was elected to the Lok Sabha from Wayanad, Kerala, in 2019, was disqualified as a Member of Parliament under the Representation of the People Act. DeshGujarat