After Surat court rejects Rahul Gandhi's plea, Digvijaya Singh says Judge was Amit Shah's lawyer

Congress on Thursday said the Surat sessions court order dismissing Rahul Gandhi's plea for stay on his conviction in the defamation case was "erroneous and unsustainable", and announced that an appeal will be filed soon against the judgment. AICC spokesman and lawyer Abhishek Singhvi said the judgment has serious flaws, which include repeated mention that Rahul's "Modi surname" remark caused defamation to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, even though the latter is not a petitioner in the case. Addressing a press conference after the Surat court's dismissal of Rahul's appeal, Singhvi said, "A most unfortunate and unsustainable legal decision of the magistrate has been upheld in an even more unsustainable and erroneous judgment of the sessions court. The conviction has been upheld contrary to all basic elementary principles of law. The judgment will be challenged in accordance with law in the very near future." Pointing to the 'flaws" in the judgement, Singhvi said the court has noted that PM Modi has been defamed along with 13 crore other persons who have the Modi surname. "Clearly, unfortunately, the judgement is influenced by the high office of the PM, forgetting that the PM is not the complainant," he said, adding, "We are confident that superior courts with constitutional power of judicial review, the High Court and the Supreme Court, will set right the legal errors found in these two judgments. We are clear that the judgment in devoid of valid sustainable legal reasoning."