Court Clears Rahul Gandhi in Amit Shah Defamation Case

Rahul Gandhi stood in a Sultanpur courtroom on Monday as a judge ended an eight-year defamation case over his remarks about Amit Shah. The court ruled that the comments were not defamatory and cleared the Congress leader, now the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha. Gandhi had travelled from Delhi to attend the verdict. ^1,5

The case began with a speech in Bengaluru during the 2018 Karnataka Assembly election campaign. Gandhi questioned the BJP’s claims of clean politics and called Shah, then the party’s national president, an accused in a murder case. BJP leader Vijay Mishra filed his complaint in August 2018. Gandhi appeared in court in 2024 and received bail. The case then moved through witness testimony and arguments before Monday’s ruling. ^5,9

The ruling matters because it rejects the claim that Gandhi’s words amounted to criminal defamation. It does not decide whether every political argument in the speech was true. Shah had been cleared by a special CBI court in the Sohrabuddin encounter case in 2014. Mishra tried to match Gandhi’s voice to a recording of the speech, but the trial court rejected the effort. Later challenges also failed. The verdict closes this case, while a separate case over Gandhi’s 2019 remarks about Prime Minister Narendra Modi remains on hold by order of the Supreme Court. ^5,9,15

The verdict came after an earlier disruption on Gandhi’s journey to court. Police said a vehicle at the front of his convoy braked suddenly on the Purvanchal Expressway, causing vehicles behind it to collide. Gandhi was safe, and no major injuries were reported. Reports differed on the number of injured people. With the Sultanpur complaint dismissed, the next court-related development in these reports concerns the separate Modi case, whose proceedings remain on hold. ^1,6