National spokesperson of Bharatiya Janata Party and a Supreme Court of India lawyer, Meenakshi Lekhi has filed a contempt petition against Congress chief Rahul Gandhi over his ‘Chowkidar chor hain’ remarks against PM Modi after the Supreme Court order on Rafale.

The Supreme court has agreed to hear the contempt petition filed by the BJP lawmaker against Rahul Gandhi on April 15. The matter was mentioned in the court by Senior Counsel Mukul Rohatgi. The Bench comprising CJI Ranjan Gogoi and Justice Sanjiv Khanna will hear the matter on Monday.

Supreme Court agrees to hear on April 15, a contempt petition of BJP MP Meenakshi Lekhi against Congress President Rahul Gandhi. pic.twitter.com/yDSbDJ8qAG — ANI (@ANI) April 12, 2019

The BJP on Wednesday slammed the Congress president after he claimed that the top court has made it “clear” that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had “committed a theft”. Rahul Gandhi made the comments referring to the SC nod on the admissibility of “leaked documents” in the Rafale case.

Addressing a press conference, Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had hit back at Rahul Gandhi over his comments hailing the Supreme Court order in the Rafale case. She had said, “the Congress president probably doesn’t read even half a paragraph of the court’s order, but here, by saying that the court has said ‘chowkidaar chor hai’, it is verging on contempt of court.”

- Advertisement -

The president of a party which has been in power for so many years has shown his frustration bt attributing words to the apex which were not uttered, she said.

Nirmala Sitharaman had clarified that court order was limited to whether it should consider the documents the government said were illegally obtained by petitioner.

The minister, irked by Rahul’s comment, said that he had crossed the norms of decency by misrepresenting the Supreme Court, “His pet line and his pet theory, he says Supreme Court has accepted graft, where was it accepted? A person who is on bail, who has given him the right to mislead, to misinterpret court verdict?”

On Wednesday the apex court allowed the admissibility of three documents as evidence in re-examining the review petitions concerning the Rafale deal. Court had dismissed the union government’s objections on the maintainability of the documents. The documents related to the Rafale deal are from the defence ministry, and the government says that they were illegally obtained by the petitioners and the newspapers that had published them. The Supreme Court had earlier given a clean chit to PM Modi in the Rafale deal, and it is hearing the review petitions on the issue.

The Supreme Court was hearing five Rafale review petitions, mainly on the issues of the admissibility of “stolen” Rafale documents as evidence and the claim of privilege raised on them by the government.

The Union government represented by Attorney-General KK Venugopal had argued that the review petition should be dismissed at the preliminary stage itself because they were based on “stolen” documents published in newspapers like The Hindu.

Rahul Gandhi had distorted the SC order while talking to the media, and said that Supreme Court has accepted that there is some form of corruption in Rafale deal & that “chowkidaar ne chori karwayi hai”.

Responding to the Supreme Court order, the Union government released a press statement in which the Defence Minister reiterated that the petitioners are using the “stolen” documents with an intention to present a selective and incomplete picture of the internal secret deliberations on the matter pertaining to country’s national security and defence.

“The documents presented by the petitioners are failing to bring out how the issues were addressed and resolved and necessary approvals of the competent authorities taken. These are a selective and incomplete presentation of the facts and records by the petitioners,” said Defence Ministry according to ANI.

Rahul Gandhi and his brigade have been using the Rafale issue as a tool to defame the Prime Minister for over a year. He has been shamelessly lying over and over again in the hope that one of them will stick given the fact that he has the support from the ‘pliant media’.