A special MP/MLA court in Sultanpur in Uttar Pradesh on Monday acquitted Congress leader Rahul Gandhi in a criminal defamation case arising from remarks he made about Union Home Minister Amit Shah in 2018.
Gandhi, who is the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, was present in the court when Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate Shubham Verma pronounced the verdict. The court held that the remarks at the centre of the case were not defamatory in nature, bringing to an end a trial that had run for more than eight years after the complaint was first filed.
The case was filed on August 4, 2018, by local Bharatiya Janata Party leader Vijay Mishra. It concerned a statement Gandhi allegedly made at a press conference in Bengaluru on May 8, 2018, during the campaign for the Karnataka Assembly elections. At the time, Shah was the national president of the BJP.
According to the complaint, Gandhi had questioned the BJP's claims of standing for clean politics while its president was, in his words, an accused in a murder case. The remark, as reported in court proceedings, was: "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."
The reference was to the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case. Sheikh was killed in an alleged staged encounter in 2005, and Shah, who was then Gujarat's home minister, was among those accused in connection with the case. In 2014, a special court in Mumbai discharged Shah in the case, a decision that has remained a point of political contention ever since.
Mishra's complaint was filed under Sections 499 and 500 of the Indian Penal Code, the provisions that then dealt with criminal defamation and its punishment. Those provisions have since been replaced in the new criminal codes, but cases filed under the older law continue to be heard under it.
The road to trial was long. The Sultanpur court summoned Gandhi to face trial on November 27, 2023. He appeared before the court on February 20, 2024, and was granted bail. Gandhi denied the allegations, and his counsel described the complaint as politically motivated and baseless, seeking its dismissal.
During the proceedings, the complainant sought to have Gandhi's voice sample matched with a recording of the speech at issue. The trial court rejected that application in May 2026, and subsequent challenges to the decision were also dismissed by the sessions court and the Allahabad High Court. Hearings in the case concluded in October 2026, after which the court reserved its verdict.
The verdict had earlier been fixed for October 13, but it was then scheduled for October 26. Gandhi travelled to Uttar Pradesh for the pronouncement. He arrived at Lucknow's Chaudhary Charan Singh International Airport on Monday morning, where hundreds of Congress workers and local party leaders had gathered to welcome him. He did not speak to reporters before leaving for Sultanpur.
On the way to Sultanpur, his convoy was involved in a minor accident on the Purvanchal Expressway, when vehicles travelling behind his car collided with an ambulance. Gandhi was unhurt, and police said the incident was not serious and no major injuries were reported. He continued to Sultanpur and was present in court for the verdict.
Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee media department chairman Kunwar Singh Nishad said the court had dismissed the case and granted relief to Gandhi, noting that the defamation suit related to a remark made in Bengaluru during the 2018 Karnataka Assembly elections.
For the Congress, the acquittal removes a long-running legal distraction for its most prominent leader in Uttar Pradesh, a state where the party has been trying to rebuild its organisation. Gandhi represents Rae Bareli in the Lok Sabha, and Sultanpur lies in the same central Uttar Pradesh region where the party's fortunes have historically been tied to the Nehru-Gandhi family's presence.
For the BJP, the verdict is a setback in one of several defamation cases its leaders have filed against Gandhi over the years. The most consequential of those was a separate case in Gujarat, in which Gandhi was convicted in 2023 and sentenced to two years' imprisonment for a remark linking Prime Minister Narendra Modi's surname with fugitives Nirav Modi and Lalit Modi.
That conviction led to his disqualification from Parliament, but the Supreme Court later stayed the conviction, allowing him to continue as a lawmaker.
The Sultanpur case, by contrast, turned on a narrower question: whether a political remark made in the heat of an election campaign, referring to a public figure's past as an accused in a criminal case, amounts to defamation in law. The court's answer on Monday was that it does not.
That distinction matters for Indian political speech. Defamation law in India has long sat uneasily alongside the freedom of political expression, and courts have repeatedly been asked to draw the line between a false statement of fact that damages reputation and a harsh political opinion about a public figure. In this case, the court found that Gandhi's words fell on the side of political comment rather than defamation.
The verdict does not erase the underlying political argument about the Sohrabuddin Sheikh case, which continues to divide opinion. Supporters of Shah point to his discharge by the special CBI court in 2014 as a complete answer to the allegation. Critics of that discharge have argued that the case raised questions about encounter killings and the use of state power that were never fully tested at trial.
The Sultanpur court was not deciding that larger controversy; it was deciding only whether Gandhi's 2018 remark was defamatory.
The acquittal also closes a chapter that began when Gandhi was Congress president, a post he held during the 2018 Karnataka campaign. The Karnataka election that year produced a hung assembly, and the campaign was marked by sharp exchanges between the Congress and the BJP over corruption and clean governance. Gandhi's remark about Shah was part of that exchange, aimed at turning the BJP's anti-corruption pitch back on itself.
Eight years on, the political landscape has changed considerably. Gandhi is now Leader of the Opposition, a role that gives him a formal platform in Parliament to challenge the government. Shah remains one of the most powerful figures in the BJP and the Union government. The two men continue to define much of the national political contest, and Monday's verdict is unlikely to soften that rivalry.
What the verdict does do is remove one legal threat from Gandhi's path, at least at the trial court stage. Any further legal step in the matter would lie before higher courts, and neither side had immediately announced its next move when the verdict was pronounced.
For now, the immediate significance is straightforward: a court in Sultanpur has examined an eight-year-old complaint about an election-campaign remark and found that the remark was not defamatory. Gandhi left the court an acquitted man, and the case that followed him from Bengaluru in 2018 to Sultanpur in 2026 has come to an end.
(Reporting based on The Hindu and Bar and Bench.)