Lok Sabha’s Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi was granted bail by a special MP MLA court in Pune on Friday in the Savarkar defamation case after he appeared before the court through video conferencing.
Gandhi was granted bail by the court on a surety bond of Rs 25,000, while senior Congress leader Mohan Joshi stood as surety before the court.
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Advocate Milind Pawar, who represented Gandhi said that the Pune court also granted permanent exemption to the Congress MP from appearing before it. The next hearing in the matter is scheduled for February 18, the lawyer said.
It may be recalled that a defamation case was filed against Rahul Gandhi by Satyaki Savarkar, the grandnephew of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar after Gandhi made an allegedly objectionable statement against Savarkar in a speech he made in London in March 2023.
Allegedly, Gandhi had stated in his March 2023 speech that Savarkar had written about an incident in a book, where he along with his friends beat up a Muslim man and that Savarkar felt “happy” about it.
However, Savarkar’s nephew Satyaki Savarkar had dismissed these allegations and called them “false, fictitious, and malicious”. Satyaki had stated that Vinayak Damodar Savarkar had never written anything which Gandhi mentioned because no such incident had ever happened.
Satyaki also mentioned in his petition that Gandhi’s statements were damaging to his great-great uncle’s reputation.
