Politics

Supreme Court Denies Relief to AAP’s Sanjay Singh in PM Modi’s Degree Defamation Case

Sanjay Singh, the AAP MP, was served a defamation summons on Monday for casting doubt on the competence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The Supreme Court declined to postpone the summons. In the defamation case Gujarat University filed, Sanjay Singh contested the summons issued by a Gujarati court. The Gujarat High Court struck down an order by which the Chief Information Commissioner had to give them details about Modi’s educational qualifications under the Right to Information (RTI) Act. Piyush Patel, the registrar of Gujarat University, then filed a defamation suit against Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and Sanjay Singh for their purported remarks.

Gujarat University reportedly launched a defamation lawsuit against Arvind Kejriwal and Sanjay Singh. In January, the trial court’s operations were suspended by the Supreme Court. The decision was made by a bench of Justices BR Gavai and Sandeep Mehta during the hearing of Sanjay Singh’s request to have the case transferred from its current Gujarati trial court to another outside of the state, ideally Kolkata.

On a motion submitted by the leaders of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) to have the summonses they had received from the trial court quashed, the top court instructed the Gujarat high court to rule within four weeks. In August of last year, Arvind Kejriwal’s plea contesting the high court ruling that denied his request to stop the university’s criminal defamation proceedings was turned down by the top court. According to the article, the high court denied the motion filed by Arvind Kejriwal and Sanjay Singh on August 11 of last year, which sought an interim stay on the criminal defamation proceedings against them.

Kejriwal and Singh were previously summoned by a metropolitan court in Gujarat about their purportedly “sarcastic” and “derogatory” remarks regarding Modi’s educational qualifications. The two leaders of the AAP then challenged the summonses from the metropolitan court in a revision plea that they filed before the session court. Their request for a temporary stay of the trial was denied by the session court, so they turned to the high court.

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In his case, Patel claims that both leaders attacked the university over Modi’s degrees by making “defamatory” remarks at press conferences and on the microblogging site X. According to the complaint, their remarks disparaging Gujarat University damaged the university’s reputation, which has made a name for itself in the public eye. The Central Information Commission (CIC) issued an order in 2016 directing the Gujarat University to provide Arvind Kejriwal with information about Modi’s educational background. On March 31 of that year, the high court overturned this order, noting that the AAP chief’s RTI request seemed to be driven more by political motivation than by sound public interest considerations.