Lawyer Says He Filed Plea Citing Threat to Rahul Gandhi's Safety Without His Approval
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New Delhi: Lok Sabha leader of opposition Rahul Gandhi's lawyer has said that he filed a plea before a Pune court without his client's approval informing the bench that Gandhi feared for his safety against the backdrop of – among other things – the lineage of Satyaki Savarkar, who has accused the Congress MP of defamation.
Advocate Milind Pawar said in a statement on Wednesday (August 13) that he drafted the plea “without consulting” Gandhi and filed it in court “without instructions from” his client.
“My client has taken strong exception” to the filing of the plea and ‘disagrees with’ its contents, wrote Pawar, adding that he would file an application for withdrawing it on Thursday.
The plea had urged the special MP/MLA court in Pune, where the defamation case is being heard, to take judicial notice of the matter. It said that Gandhi has “grave apprehensions” regarding his safety and the fairness of the proceedings in the case, reported Bar and Bench.
It also sought the state's "preventive protection".
“Preventive protection is not only prudent but is a constitutional obligation upon the State," the plea said per Bar and Bench.
The plea was filed, it said, as a “protective and precautionary measure for safeguarding the fairness, integrity and transparency of the present proceedings.”
It stated that Savarkar in a written statement filed on July 29 had admitted that he is a direct descendant of Nathuram Godse, who shot Mahatma Gandhi dead in 1950, through his maternal family. The plea also noted the fact that Savarkar has claimed descent from Hindu nationalist thinker Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.
Given the “documented history of violent and anti-constitutional tendencies linked to the complainant's lineage, and considering the prevailing political climate, there exists a clear, reasonable, and substantial apprehension that Gandhi may face harm, wrongful implication, or other forms of targeting by persons subscribing to the ideology of Vinayak Savarkar,” the plea said per LiveLaw.
It said that Mahatma Gandhi's assassination was not an impulsive act but the ‘calculated outcome of a conspiracy, rooted in a specific ideology, culminating in deliberate violence against an unarmed person’, per Bar and Bench.
“In view of the grave history associated with such lineage, the defence harbours a genuine and reasonable apprehension that history must not be permitted to repeat itself,” the submission to the court stated.
The plea also spoke about Gandhi’s recent political interventions, including his press conference on numerous discrepancies in the voter rolls of the Mahadevapura assembly seat in Bengaluru, which he has claimed were a result of the Election Commission colluding with the BJP. These, the plea said, have triggered hostility from his political opponents.
It referred to Gandhi’s speech in parliament in which he said that "A true Hindu is never violent. A Hindu cannot spread hatred. The BJP spreads hatred and violence, and you do not represent Hindus.”
The submission also pointed to press conferences held by Union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw and BJP MP Sudhanshu Trivedi who, Gandhi's lawyer said, accused him of insulting the Hindu community and lowering the dignity of his position.
The application also cited two public threats, one by Union minister Ravneet Singh Bittu calling Gandhi the “number one terrorist of the country” and another by BJP leader Tarvinder Singh Marwah.
The court was originally scheduled to hear the matter next on September 10.
The case pertains to a speech delivered by Gandhi in London in March 2023 in which he had reportedly referred to Savarkar’s writings about an incident where Savarkar, along with others, allegedly assaulted a Muslim man – a situation Savarkar supposedly found “pleasurable”.
Satyaki Savarkar had filed the defamation case against Gandhi in 2023, claiming that no such incident about Savarkar is mentioned in his works.
This story was updated with news of Gandhi's lawyer saying he filed the case without his client's permission.
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