AHMEDABAD: A Surat court on Thursday said that it would pronounce on April 20 the order on Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s plea for a stay to his conviction in a criminal defamation case over his “Modi surname” remark.
A metropolitan magistrate’s court in Surat had on March 23 sentenced Gandhi to two years in jail after holding him guilty for his remark in 2019. Gandhi, who was disqualified as MP after the conviction, filed an appeal before the sessions court in Surat against the verdict and prayed for a stay to the conviction.
Senior advocate R S Cheema, representing Gandhi, told sessions judge R P Mogera that the trial court need not have awarded the maximum punishment prescribed for the offence. The magistrate’s order was “strange” as he “made a hotchpotch of all the evidence on record”, Cheema argued.
“It was not a fair trial. The entire case was based on electronic evidence, wherein I made a speech during elections and a person sitting 100 km away filed a complaint after watching that in the news...There was no need for maximum punishment in this case,” he said.