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BLOOMBERG
India’s top court stayed Rahul Gandhi’s conviction in a high-stakes defamation case, enabling the opposition leader to seek his reinstatement as a lawmaker and to contest general elections due next year.
In their judgment, a three-person Supreme Court bench said that Gandhi’s conviction impacts not only him, but also “the rights of the electorate who have elected him to represent their constituency.”
Gandhi, 53, the leader of the main opposition Congress party, was sentenced to two years in jail by a lower court for allegedly making defamatory remarks about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s surname during an election rally in 2019.
The conviction disqualified Gandhi from serving in Parliament and jeopardised his ability to contest elections for six years after being released from jail. A second court suspended his jail term until Gandhi’s appeal is decided.
In explaining the ruling, the Supreme Court said the lower court had failed to justify why it imposed such a strident sentence on Gandhi. Many of Modi’s opponents see the case against the Congress leader as politically motivated.