Sultanpur, Uttar Pradesh: The hearing in a defamation complaint against Leader of Opposition (LoP) in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi in a special court in Sultanpur could not take place on Tuesday as lawyers abstained from work in the wake of a senior advocate's death.
Additional Civil Judge (Senior Division) Shubham Verma of the Special MP-MLA court has now fixed October 1 for the next hearing.
The case relates to alleged objectionable remarks made by Gandhi against Union Home Minister Amit Shah, the then Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief, in Bengaluru in 2018.
BJP leader Vijay Mishra, a former chairman of a district cooperative bank, had filed the defamation complaint against Gandhi on August 4, 2018.
Santosh Kumar Pandey, who is the counsel for Mishra, said that "lawyers abstained from work following the death of senior advocate Krishna Chandra Srivastava, due to which no work could be taken up today (Tuesday)". He said that the court has fixed the next hearing on October 1.
Arguments in the case began on September 21 when Pandey made his submissions, but the proceedings could not be concluded.
ACJM Shubham Verma then fixed September 29 for the remaining arguments in the case, Gandhi's counsel, Kashi Prasad Shukla, had said. Shukla had said that he would present arguments in the case once the complainant's arguments conclude.
The court had summoned Gandhi to appear in the case on November 27, 2023. After he failed to appear, a warrant was issued. Gandhi subsequently appeared before the court on February 20, 2024, and was granted bail after furnishing two sureties of Rs 25,000 and Rs 24,000.
His statement was recorded in the case on July 26, 2024. Mishra, on March 28, 2026, sought the matching of Gandhi's voice sample with a compact disc he had submitted to the special court. The disc reportedly contains video and audio recordings of Gandhi's 2018 election speech in Bengaluru.
The trial court rejected the plea on May 2, and the sessions court dismissed his challenge on July 15.
Mishra subsequently approached the Allahabad High Court, which also dismissed his petition, Shukla had said. On September 3, the complainant's lawyer had informed the court that a petition challenging the rejection of an application seeking comparison of Gandhi's voice sample had been filed in the high court on September 1.