Rahul Gandhi convicted in 2019 ‘Modi surname’ remarks case, sentenced to 2 years in jail by Surat District Court

The Surat court found Congress leader Rahul Gandhi guilty of allegedly making a joke in 2019 about "Modi's surname" and sentenced him to two years in jail.

Purnesh Modi, a BJP MLA and former Gujarati, filed a complaint in which he claimed that Rahul Gandhi had said,

"How come all the thieves have Modi as the common surname" during the incident.

Rahul Gandhi had made fun of a whole community at an election rally in the lead-up to the elections in 2019 by saying, "Nirav Modi, Lalit Modi, Narendra Modi... how come they all have Modi as a common surname?" Why do all thieves share the surname Modi?

Purnesh Modi, a BJP MLA  from Surat, had filed a complaint against the Congress leader for defaming the Modi community as a whole. Rahul Gandhi, the former president of the Congress, was arrested under the criminal defamation provisions of Sections 499 and 500 of the Indian Penal Code.

In order to record his statement, Rahul Gandhi appeared before a magistrate's court in Surat in June 2021.
Rahul Gandhi, the son of Gandhi, denied making any defamatory remarks about people with the surname "Modi" during the hearing. As per Desh Gujarat, a legal counselor has said that Rahul Gandhi answered each inquiry with, "I don't have any idea, I don't have any idea, I don't have the foggiest idea".

The Congress leader claimed that he is a national leader who raises issues of corruption and unemployment in his speeches in the interest of the nation when the magistrate asked him if he had accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of giving Rs 30 crore to an industrialist. The scion of Gandhi asserted that he was entitled to bring up such topics at rallies.

Gandhi claimed that he never said that all Modi family members were thieves when the court asked if he had. Prior to that, Rahul Gandhi had pleaded not guilty to the charge of making the remark when he appeared in court in October 2019.

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