Gandhi's 'bullet train' conviction draws focus on judiciary

For a court system with a backlog of 40m cases, there was one lawsuit that appeared to move through India’s court rooms unusually fast

- HANNAH ELLIS-PETERSEN

The case related to India’s most well-known main opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, and comments that he had made at a campaign rally during the 2019 general election.

In a speech, Gandhi had compared his political rival, the incumbent prime minister, Narendra Modi, with two convicted criminals who also bore the same surname. “Why do all these thieves have Modi as a surname?” Gandhi asked the crowds gathered in the state of Karnataka.

Hundreds of kilometres away in Gujarat, Purnesh Modi, an elected representative of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), appeared to take the comment personally. He filed a legal case against Gandhi, who was then president of the Congress party, alleging he had defamed the “entire Modi community”. According to rough estimates, there are about 130 million people called Modi in India.

For the next two years, the case progressed at a glacial pace common to India’s courts. But after the judge refused to comply with Purnesh Modi’s request that Gandhi be summoned to the court for a second time, Modi went to the high court to make an unusual request: that the case be indefinitely halted. The Gujarat high court agreed. It remained on pause until 16 February this year, when suddenly Purnesh Modi decided he wanted to unfreeze the case, and he returned to the high court, citing “new evidence” that would never appear.

The court again agreed. With a new judge at its helm, the case moved, as one Congress leader described it, like a “bullet train”. Seven hearings took place in just 20 days and by 23 March, the judge was ready with a verdict.