Supreme Court provides no relief in AAP leader Sanjay Singh defamation case

Sanjay Singh must now hear the case in the Gujarat trial court (File)

New Delhi:

AAP leader Sanjay Singh on Monday failed to get relief from the Supreme Court in a defamation suit filed over his alleged comments on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s educational qualifications.

The Lok Sabha MP will now have to hear the case before a trial court in Gujarat.

The Supreme Court dismissed Singh’s plea against a Gujarat High Court order refusing to quash the summons issued against him in the case.

“We do not intend to entertain the present petition,” Justices B R Gavai and Sandeep Mehta said.

The bench said the high court had observed that all disputes that could be raised by the parties remained open and the trial judge would not be influenced by any observations made in its order.

On February 16, the high court had dismissed the pleas of Singh and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal to quash the summons issued against them in the defamation case.

Mr. Kejriwal and Mr. Singh had challenged the summons issued by the trial court in the High Court case against Gujarat University and the subsequent order of the session court dismissing their revision application against the summons.

A metropolitan court in Gujarat had earlier summoned Kejriwal and Singh in a defamation case for allegedly making “sarcastic” and “derogatory” remarks about Prime Minister Modi’s education degree.

After the Gujarat High Court dismissed the chief information commissioner’s order to provide information about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s degree under the Right to Information (RTI) Act, Gujarat University provost Piyush Patel A defamation lawsuit was filed against them.

According to the complaint filed by Patel, the two leaders made “defamatory” remarks at press conferences and on Weibo platform X, targeting the university over Modi’s degree issue.

The complainants claimed that their statements against the University of Gujarat were defamatory and had damaged the institution’s prestigious reputation among the public.

“Their comments were sarcastic and were intended to harm the university’s reputation,” Patel said in the complaint.

On March 31 last year, the high court had quashed a 2016 order of the Central Information Commission (CIC) directing the Gujarat University to provide information about Modi’s degree to Kejriwal, holding that the AAP chief’s RTI request seemed “politically vexatious” , and motive” rather than based on “reasonable public interest considerations”.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)