Rahul Gandhi will apologise to the Supreme Court, after all. He was pulled up by the court on Tuesday while it heard the contempt plea filed by a BJP MP, Meenakshi Lekhi. Gandhi had, completely falsely, mind you, ascribed to the apex court his own cheap-shot that `chowkidar chor hai’ against the Prime Minister. The court had done no such thing.
Even in mitigation that his own credibility being pretty low, he needed outside endorsement of his nonsensical charge against Modi would not permit taking such liberties with the highest court in the land. The court has to protect its credibility, its institutional dignity against such traducers who drag its name for their own selfish motives.
Unfortunately, even when given a chance to make amends and apologise for attributing to the court what it had not suggested even remotely, the Congress President hummed and hawed, refusing to apologise. His high-profile lawyers were pressed into service, obliged to do the cleaning after he had created the mess with his loose and irresponsible remarks. Not that he has misquoted or mangled words of others for the first time.
But this he was doing with the highest court in the land, dragging it into low-grade politics, telling people on the stump that the Supreme Court has said that `chowkidar chor hai.’ Such immaturity is unbecoming for someone who aspires to be the prime minister of India. In the court, it took the rebuke from the Chief Justice, Ranjan Gogoi, for Gandhi’s lawyer, Abhishek Manu Singhvi, to offer to file a fresh affidavit with due apology.
“You take 22 pages of affidavit to express regret?, he ticked off Gandhi’s counsel. And it did not have one word which would have helped purge the contempt, that is, apologise. Instead, relying on too-clever-by-half lawyers, the Gandhi affidavit mentioned the word regret but only in brackets. Again, the bench ticked off Gandhi for contradictions in the affidavit, admitting mistake at one point and at another denying making any contemptuous remarks.
The Congress President ought to have appreciated that you cannot treat the highest court in a cavalier manner. His response to the contempt petition was frivolous and irresponsible. He was wrongly advised to file a 22-page reply mentioning everything else but the word apology.
Attributing words to the court was a clear falsehood, nay, an affront to its honour and dignity. Yet, when caught mouthing a lie, instead of making amends he was playing games with the Supreme Court. This was reprehensible. Besides, it wasted the court’s precious time. The court is set to take up the matter again next week along with the PIL filed by the activist lawyer Prashant Bhushan and others in the Rafale case.
The court rejected the plea of the government for time and asked it file its response by May 4. It had agreed to re-open the case following the publication of some documents related to the Rafale deal. How the documents were procured by the media was not important as long as those were authentic, the court had said in an earlier order.
