28/Oct/2026
5 min read
Can party workers prosecute insults to their leader? Three high courts allowed it, but a Sultanpur magistrate did not.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi during a “March for Democracy” to the Supreme Court against Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar, in New Delhi, Monday, Oct. 12, 2026. Photo: PTI/Arun Sharma.
In 1858, an English judge posed the issue in one sentence. Sir James Shaw Willes of the Court of Common Pleas said in Eastwood v. Holmes: “If a man wrote that all lawyers were thieves, no particular lawyer could sue him unless there is something to point to the particular individual.” The House of Lords invoked the same principle in Knupffer v. London Express Newspaper (1944). A wartime article said Young Russia, an émigré group, was a body of quislings, and the leader of its English branch sued. But the Lords dismissed his defamation claim because the words targeted a party of about 2,000 members based in Paris and America.
Why should that rule matter to a magistrate in Uttar Pradesh? Indian law codified it in two provisions that pull in opposite directions. Explanation 2 to Section 499 of the Indian Penal Code states that it may amount to defamation to make an imputation concerning a company, an association, or a “collection of persons”. Section 199 of the Code of Criminal Procedure states that a court can take cognisance of the offence of defamation only on a complaint by “some person aggrieved”. The question is: how much does the second provision qualify the first? In G. Narasimhan v. T.V. Chokkappa (1972), the Supreme Court said that such a group must be definite and identifiable, so that one can identify who is aggrieved. It added that a trial held on a complaint by someone who is not aggrieved would be void and illegal.PlayNextMute
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On October 26, Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate (ACJM) Shubham Verma in Sultanpur acquitted Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, of defaming in 2018 Union Home Minister Amit Shah, then BJP’s president. The Supreme Court has stayed many similar prosecutions without noting who can file the case. ACJM Verma’s 49-page judgment, written in Hindi, states this quite clearly. Where the law dictated the answer should have come at the threshold, before Gandhi’s summons, it came only after an eight-year trial.
Also read: Court Acquits Rahul Gandhi in BJP Leader’s Defamation Case Over Calling Amit Shah ‘Murder Accused’
Gandhi made the statement in a press conference at Bengaluru on May 8, 2018, days before the Karnataka Assembly election. Asked about Shah’s claim that the courts had cleared B.S. Yediyurappa, the BJP’s chief ministerial candidate, he retorted that the party which spoke of honesty had “a murder accused” as its president. Vijay Mishra, who identified himself as the BJP’s Sultanpur district vice-president, filed a complaint under Section 500 of the Indian Penal Code on August 4, 2018.
On July 15, 2018, Mishra told the court that two party colleagues came to his house, played the clip on a phone and urged him to leave the party whose president was being called a murderer. Mishra claimed he went hungry for days, which was not stated in the complaint. The magistrate noted that a party office-bearer claiming a close link with Shah had first learnt of the comment more than two months after it was uttered.
The magistrate posed three questions: was the clip proved; could Mishra lodge a complaint; and was the comment defamatory. The first was proved despite the CD having been copied from a forwarded video, and Mishra could not say who made it. The court held it proved because Gandhi did not say anything about correction, editing, or tampering with the words, and claimed only that they had been quoted out of context.
The complainant has no right to prosecute unless the words relate to him, and Mishra did not claim they did. He argued that because his identity was so closely linked to Shah’s, even the slightest contempt of him would dent his reputation. But Explanation 4 to Section 499 treats a person’s reputation as being harmed only when others think less of the person, so the proof of the other’s hatred of Gandhi will not suffice. Ram Chandra Dubey, a retired Roadways bus conductor who had watched the clip with Mishra, admitted that Gandhi had not spoken about him, Mishra or any other BJP office-bearer in Sultanpur. Neither he nor the second witness claimed insult, so the proof of reduced status that Explanation 4 required was missing.
The witnesses could not even agree on how they reached Mishra’s house. Anil Mishra claimed he ran into Dubey by chance at Lohramau and they each rode his own motorcycle; Dubey said they met at the BJP office in Sultanpur and journeyed together. The two colleagues who supplied the clip were never called at trial. Noting also that Mishra gave television interviews on the case, the magistrate concluded that either he was too sensitive or the complaint was lodged with a political colour or for extraneous motives.
Could Mishra then speak for the BJP? He failed to produce any authority from it, and did not even prove he was its district vice-president. He had also failed to establish his membership of a group definite enough for Explanation 2. For this he relied partly on M.P. Narayana Pillai v. M.P. Chacko, decided by Justice S. Padmanabhan of the Kerala High Court in 1986. A Syrian Christian there had objected to remarks about women of his community, and Justice Padmanabhan held that a community spread across the world could not be identified as a body. He noted that an earlier Kerala ruling had said the same of the Marxist communist party.
That is why, the magistrate reasoned, party membership alone cannot make a person aggrieved. Otherwise every member could sue over one remark, and a society governed by law could not accept the countless prosecutions that would follow, least of all under Section 199.
Such prosecutions have in fact followed this very accusation. After Gandhi said much the same about Shah at the Congress plenary in Delhi in March 2018, a BJP worker, Navin Jha, prosecuted him in Ranchi. In February 2024, Justice Ambuj Nath of the Jharkhand High Court refused to quash that complaint, holding that the BJP was a well-identifiable party and that a worker had standing. In 2024, the Delhi High Court held, in a complaint against Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, that a registered party is an identifiable body. On September 8, Justice N.R. Borkar of the Bombay High Court followed that ruling in a case over Gandhi’s description of Prime Minister Narendra Modi as “Commander-in-Thief”. He dismissed Gandhi’s petition and left a BJP member’s standing to be tested at trial. The Supreme Court has since stayed both the Ranchi and Mumbai trials, the latter on October 13.
There is a fair case for the Jharkhand and Bombay view. A registered party keeps membership rolls, which makes it easier to identify than “lawyers” or a religious community, and Narasimhan itself let every member of a well-defined class complain. The Sultanpur reasoning answers by asking whether the words were aimed at the party at all. Read as a whole, the magistrate said, the remark concerned Shah, and the BJP figured only because Shah then led it. On that view, an accusation against a party’s president remains an accusation against him.
The Andhra Pradesh ruling he relied on, V. Radhakrishna v. Alla Rama Krishna Reddy, shows the distinction at work. A YSR Congress legislator had complained about a newspaper report on the party’s president, Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy, and in January 2018 Justice M. Satyanarayana Murthy quashed the complaint. He held that only the president could complain about an accusation aimed solely at him, though the party’s secretary could complain about one aimed at the party.
How did such a complaint even reach a full trial? The complaint was filed in August 2018, and the court summoned Gandhi in November 2023. The court framed the charge in July 2024, evidence began that October, and Gandhi answered in February this year. He travelled to Sultanpur in person to secure bail, respond to the evidence, and hear the verdict. On Narasimhan’s reasoning, a complaint like this might well have been stopped at the cognisance stage.
In Subramanian Swamy v. Union of India (2016), the Supreme Court said that whether a complainant is aggrieved depends on the facts of each case. Here the trial added nothing to what the complaint disclosed, because every witness came from within the party. The magistrate quoted the Court’s warning in S. Khushboo v. Kanniammal that starting a criminal trial carries “an implicit degree of coercion”. The actor Khushboo had faced several criminal complaints over remarks on premarital sex before the Supreme Court quashed them in 2010.
Parliament has since changed the procedure for complaints like Mishra’s. Since July 1, 2024, a proviso to Section 223 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita bars cognisance of a complaint without first hearing the accused. In May 2025, the Supreme Court set aside a special court’s cognisance order in a money-laundering case, Kushal Kumar Agarwal v. Directorate of Enforcement, because the accused had not been heard. Filed today, Mishra’s complaint would allow Gandhi to argue, before any summons is issued, that Mishra was not a “person aggrieved”.
Less secure is the third finding, that the remark was not defamatory at all. The magistrate held that political speech must cross a “Higher Degree Threshold” to be defamatory, and called this a well-settled principle. His authority was an order of Justices Hrishikesh Roy and S.V.N. Bhatti, dated September 30, 2024, on a BJP leader’s complaint against former Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. The order issued notice and stayed the trial. While an appellate court may treat its remarks on the threshold as an interim observation, the Supreme Court cited its previous ruling in S. Khushboo to reiterate that the threshold must be higher than usual, especially in the context of public discourse among political personalities and parties.
Part of the finding also rests on material the magistrate gathered himself. He watched the full clip on YouTube, three minutes and 52 seconds long, and saw that Gandhi had been speaking about jobs, farm loan waivers, and corruption before the reporter asked about Yediyurappa.
Were Gandhi’s words true? Both sides argued the point hardest, and the judgment leaves it undecided. Shah had been charge-sheeted in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case, and a special CBI court discharged him on December 30, 2014. The Supreme Court declined to reopen the discharge in 2016. Gandhi’s words in 2018 mixed the past tense, that Shah “has been accused of murder”, with the present, that he “is a murder accused”. The first was a matter of record, while the second was at least debatable. The magistrate recounted this history but never ruled on the First Exception, which protects true accusations made for the public good.
Several such complaints are now before the Supreme Court, each held in place by an interim stay. Taken to its limit, the Delhi, Jharkhand and Bombay view lets any member of a mass party prosecute a rival’s remark about its leader anywhere. That is the flood of cases the Sultanpur magistrate thought no system governed by law could accept. Taken to the extreme, the Sultanpur view gives office-bearers, acting on the party’s authority, the power to decide whether to prosecute. Section 199 was written to leave that choice with the persons defamed, yet either reading lets them stay away while others litigate in their names.
The Supreme Court may itself hesitate to lay down a universal rule, since Subramanian Swamy leaves it to the facts of each case. Even after it rules on the pending petitions, the outcome of each new complaint will remain uncertain until its facts are tried.
V. Venkatesan is a contributing editor at Supreme Court Observer.
This article went live on October twenty-eighth, two thousand twenty six, at forty-eight minutes past nine in the morning.
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