Congress leader and former party chief Rahul Gandhi needs to be more careful with what he says, the Supreme Court said today while closing a contempt case filed against him for wrongly linking its Rafale case order to his “chowkidar chor hai” phrase against Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
A three-member bench headed by Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi said the court accepted an unconditional apology by the Congress leader.
BJP leader Meenakshi Lekhi had filed a defamation case against Rahul Gandhi for his comments made on April 10, a day after the Supreme Court said that classified documents accessed by the media could be used as evidence to consider a review of its earlier decision on the Rafale jet deal with France’s Dassault Aviation.
The Congress leader had said that the “court has agreed that chowkidar chor hai”.
After the Supreme Court demanded an explanation, Rahul Gandhi issued an “unconditional apology” and said the remark was made “unintentionally and inadvertently” in the “heat of political campaigning” and that it had been made within a purely political context to counter a “misinformation campaign” regarding some aspects of the Rafale fighter jet deal.