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Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has been cleared of criminal defamation charges by a court in Sultanpur, Uttar Pradesh, over his 2018 comments concerning Union Home Minister Amit Shah. The court ruled that the remarks did not amount to defamation and declared Rahul not guilty.
The Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha appeared personally before the Special MP-MLA Court in Sultanpur when the verdict was delivered.
The controversy originated at a press conference held in Bengaluru in May 2018, ahead of the Karnataka Assembly elections. During the event, Rahul brought up the Gujarat and Rajasthan police’s extrajudicial killing of gangster Sohrabuddin Sheikh in 2005.
The case triggered a high-profile investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which initially named several senior police officers and Amit Shah, who was then serving as Gujarat’s Minister of State for Home Affairs, among those implicated. In December 2018, a special CBI court acquitted all 22 accused, citing insufficient evidence and witnesses turning hostile.
While discussing the case in 2018, Rahul referred Amit Shah, who was the BJP’s national president at the time, as a “murder accused”.
"People in India forget that the president of BJP is a murder accused. That's the truth. The party that talks about honesty, decency, has a person who has been accused of murder as president of the BJP,” he stated.
Following the remarks, Vijay Mishra, who was then the BJP’s district vice-president in Sultanpur, initiated criminal defamation proceedings against Rahul under sections 499 (defamation) and 500 (punishment for defamation) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
Throughout the legal proceedings, Rahul denied the allegations, arguing that his statements had been taken out of context. Mishra, however, maintained that the comments had damaged the Home Minister’s reputation and were defamatory.
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