The Supreme Court chided former Congress president Rahul Gandhi for going overboard in making statements that the SC had endorsed his Rafale deal linked ‘chowkidar chor hai’ jibe at PM Narendra Modi during election campaigns and said “certainly Gandhi needs to be more careful in future”.
While the decision on the contempt petition initiated by BJP MP Meenakshi Lekhi was rendered by CJI Ranjan Gogoi and Justice Sanjay K Kaul, Justice K M Joseph in a concurrent 75-page judgment did not utter a word about contempt proceedings against Rahul except saying, “I agree with Justice Kaul.” Justice Kaul, also writing on behalf of CJI Gogoi, dealt with the contempt case against Rahul in less than four pages and dropped contempt proceedings against him by accepting his belated unconditional apology. Earlier, Rahul had said that ‘chowkidar chor hai’ jibe was hurled in a “rhetorical flourish in the heat of the moment” and that his statement had been used and misused by his political opponents to project that he had deliberately attributed the utterances to the SC. But he soon followed it up by tendering an unconditional apology and said the attribution to the SC was “unintentional, non-wilful and inadvertent”. It is the latter affidavit which saved Rahul from contempt.
The SC said, “It is unfortunate that without verification or even perusing as to what is the order passed, the contemnor (Rahul) deemed it appropriate to make statements as if this court had given an imprimatur to his allegations against the prime minister, which was far from the truth. This is not one sentence or a one off observation bit a repeated statement in different manners conveying the same. No doubt the contemnor should have been more careful.”
The three-judge bench said Rahul compounded his problem by filing a 20-page affidavit rather than simply accepting the mistake coupled with an unconditional apology. “We do believe that persons holding such important positions in the political spectrum must be more careful. As to what should be his campaign line is for a political person to consider. However, this court or for that matter no court should be dragged into this political discourse valid or invalid, while attributing aspects to the court which had never been held by the court. Certainly, Mr Gandhi needs to be more careful in future,” it said.
