New Delhi: A court in Uttar Pradesh’s Sultanpur has acquitted Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi in a defamation case filed by a Bharatiya Janata Party leader over his 2018 reference to Union home minister Amit Shah as an accused in a murder case.Gandhi, reports Bar and Bench, was present at the MP/MLA court when it pronounced the verdict.Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate Shubham Verma said that the remarks made by Gandhi were not defamatory in nature.BJP leader Vinay Mishra had filed the criminal defamation case, which was registered under Sections 499 and 500 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).The complaint came in the aftermath of Gandhi’s saying in Bengaluru, “People in India forget that the president of BJP is a murder accused. That’s the truth. The party that talks about honesty, decency, has a person who has been accused of murder as president.”Gandhi was likely to have been referring to the 2005 killing of Sohrabuddin Sheikh, the subsequent murder of his wife Kausar Bi, and the 2006 killing of Sohrabuddin’s associate Tulsiram Prajapati by police teams from Gujarat and Rajasthan. Amit Shah was Gujarat home minister at the time of the three killings.As The Wire has previously reported, the CBI chargesheet accused Shah of running a criminal extortion racket that Sohrabuddin had worked for in Rajasthan.A trial judge, however, held that there was not an “iota of evidence” that any politician was involved in the conspiracy or there was a politician-police nexus which led to fake encounters” in which the three were murdered.This is not the only defamation case against Gandhi filed by members of the BJP.In 2023, Gandhi was convicted and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment by a Gujarat court in a defamation case for his remark “all thieves have the Modi surname” in Karnataka, in 2019. While the conviction was later stayed by the Supreme Court, he was disqualified from parliament after this conviction until the interim stay came in.In an analysis for The Wire, V. Venkatesan had observed how the defamation complaints that have put Gandhi before magistrates in Mumbai, Ranchi and Sultanpur came from party workers and office-bearers of the BJP – none of whom were the person defamed. Notably, the government or its ministers do have a route available to them in cases where they allege defamation, but did not use it.