The law offers a prime minister two ways to prosecute a defamer. The first is a special route for holders of public office. Section 222(2) of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita lets a court of session take cognisance directly, on a written complaint by the public prosecutor. That route needs the Union government’s sanction, and the complaint must be filed within six months of the statement complained of.The second is the route open to every citizen. A prime minister, like any other minister, may file a complaint before a magistrate in the ordinary way. In Manoj Kumar Tiwari v Manish Sisodia (2022), Justices S. Abdul Nazeer and V. Ramasubramanian confirmed that choice. The special procedure adds to a minister’s ordinary right rather than taking it away.Prime Minister Narendra Modi has used neither route against Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi. 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 was the person defamed, none needed sanction and the six-month limit did not apply to any of them.Whether the law allows that third road is the question the Supreme Court has avoided answering since September 2024. It has instead stopped the prosecutions one at a time, four times in 21 months, most recently on October 13.That day the Mumbai case reached Justices Vikram Nath and Aparesh Kumar Singh, who stayed the trial and issued notice on Gandhi’s petition. The order ran to two sentences and gave no reasons. Each of the four was an interim order, and none of them decided who may set such a prosecution going.Modi did not go to court over Gandhi’s 2018 speech calling him the “Commander-in-Thief”. The complaint came from Mahesh Shrishrimal, who describes himself as a BJP member of two decades. His case was that calling the party’s foremost leader the chief of thieves branded every member a thief. Justice N.R. Borkar of the Bombay high court accepted enough of that to let the trial proceed. A registered national party, he held, is an identifiable body. Whether the imputation reached beyond the party’s senior leadership was a question for the trial to decide.In Delhi, senior advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi told the bench that the law was settled. A similar matter, he said, was already pending with interim relief. The bench recorded no disagreement with that submission. It asked for replies in four weeks and stopped the trial.Section 222(1) of the same Sanhita states the general rule, and it is the one that governs these cases. A court may take cognisance of defamation only on a complaint by “some person aggrieved”. The question it raises is older than this case, and older than Gandhi’s run of prosecutions. That provision carries over section 199 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which the Sanhita replaced in 2024. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, which defines the offence, goes wider than individual victims. Its explanation 2 to section 356 extends the offence to imputations against a company, an association or a collection of persons.Also read: It is Time to Get Rid of the Law of Criminal DefamationThe leading authority on who counts as aggrieved is half a century old. In G. Narasimhan v T.V. Chokkappa (1972), the Supreme Court read the earlier versions of those two provisions together. They were explanation 2 to section 499 of the Indian Penal Code and section 198 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1898. A collection of persons must be a definite and determinate body, so that the imputation can be said to touch each member. A newspaper report on a resolution passed at a Dravida Kazhagam conference, the court held, defamed no identifiable individual as the conference was an amorphous body, distinct from the party.Two later decisions mark the outer limits of the rule. In John Thomas v K. Jagadeesan (2001), Justices K.T. Thomas and R.P. Sethi held that a complainant need not be the person defamed. A director of a defamed hospital could prosecute, because the statute speaks of some person aggrieved rather than the person injured.In S. Khushboo v Kanniammal (2010), the court quashed the proceedings on 23 complaints against the actor over her remarks on premarital sex. Those complainants were strangers to any identifiable group, and so were not aggrieved at all.A registered political party plainly satisfies the Narasimhan test of a definite body, since its membership can be ascertained. The harder question is whether an attack on one leader is an imputation against that membership as such.The Delhi high court held in August 2024 that Shashi Tharoor’s “scorpion on a Shivling” remark defamed the BJP along with the prime minister. The Jharkhand high court took the same view in February 2024 of Gandhi’s remark about the BJP accepting a murder-accused as its president (a reference to Amit Shah). The Bombay high court has now reached the same conclusion on Shrishrimal’s complaint. All three high courts left the remaining question to be settled at the trial itself.For a politician, the process of trial is itself the punishment, and that is where the difficulty lies. Summons, personal appearance, exemption applications and bail bonds follow the complainant’s choice of forum. The complainant may choose any district where the speech was reported.What the Supreme Court has said in these matters carries further than what it has decided. In September 2024, Justices Hrishikesh Roy and R. Mahadevan stayed Tharoor’s trial and asked why anyone would object to a metaphor. The same stay was extended in August 2025, with the question of why the complainant should be so touchy.Justice Dipankar Datta, staying the Savarkar proceedings in April 2025 (initiated after Gandhi called Savarkar a servant of the British), warned the LoP against statements about freedom fighters. Staying the Galwan case four months later, he told him a “true Indian” would not have said all this (Gandhi had made remarks over the Galwan clash and the Chinese occupation of Indian territory). In September 2025, Justice M.M. Sundresh stayed a complaint against The Wire and said the time had come to decriminalise defamation.All of this was said in passing, and the question of who may complain remains open.Also read: Rahul Gandhi’s Defamation Conviction, Disqualification as MP Pushes the Limits of Indian LawThe court has not stopped every such prosecution put before it. On August 21 this year, Justices Datta and Sheel Nagu dismissed Sukhbir Singh Badal’s petition to quash a defamation complaint. The former deputy chief minister of Punjab was accused of calling the Akhand Kirtani Jatha a political front of Babbar Khalsa International. Senior advocate Kapil Sibal appeared for him, and the two judges had quashed the Savarkar complaint only a week earlier. The complainant there, Rajinder Pal Singh, is the spokesperson of the organisation he says was defamed. He therefore stands closer to the injury than a party worker stands to the leader’s reputation.Whether that distinction decided the matter is impossible to say, because the order gives no reasons. But the court made it clear that the Punjab and Haryana high court’s observations, which it had upheld, would not have any impact on the trial court hearing the matter.The high court, which had earlier refused to give Badal any relief in this case, had relied on the Supreme Court’s judgment in John Thomas, which had held that whether the complainant has reason to feel hurt on account of the publication is a matter to be determined by the court depending upon the facts of each case.If a company is described as engaging itself in nefarious activities, its impact would certainly fall on every director of the company and hence he can legitimately feel the pinch of it. Similarly, if a firm is described in a publication as carrying on an offensive trade, every working partner of the firm can reasonably be expected to feel aggrieved by it, the Supreme Court had held.It is reasonable to suggest, however, that none of the defamation complaints against Gandhi could invite this precedent. Most of his remarks are against individuals rather than organisations and where he said something about the RSS, the complainant is not a spokesperson of RSS or its senior leader, to invite the rigours of this judgment.The law Singhvi called settled is settled on constitutionality and open on who may complain. In Subramanian Swamy v Union of India (May 2016), Justices Dipak Misra and Prafulla C. Pant upheld the criminal defamation provisions. Those were sections 499 and 500 of the Indian Penal Code, together with section 199 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. Gandhi was among the petitioners, as was Arvind Kejriwal.The court placed reputation within Article 21 and found no chilling effect on speech. Parliament re-enacted the offence in 2023, adding community service as an alternative punishment. The Law Commission reached the same conclusion in its 285th report, made public in February 2024, well before Justice Sundresh floated decriminalisation.That judgment settled the constitutionality of the offence and left untouched the question of who may prosecute it. Whether a party worker is aggrieved by abuse of the party’s leader was not before the 2016 bench. It has been before the Supreme Court since Tharoor’s petition reached it in September 2024.The absence of a ruling is felt most in the trial courts. The Surat magistrate – hearing a complaint against Gandhi for a 2019 remark suggesting the PM is a thief – chose to impose the maximum sentence available to the court. The only stated reason given was the Supreme Court’s own 2019 admonition of Gandhi in a contempt matter. The Supreme Court stayed that conviction in August 2023, noting that no other reason had been offered.Section 8(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 unseats a legislator sentenced to two years or more. The length of a magistrate’s sentence can therefore decide who sits in parliament. On October 26 a Sultanpur court will rule on an allegation about Amit Shah. The Supreme Court has kept the same allegation frozen in Jharkhand since January 2025. The same imputation may end in conviction in one state and in a stay in another.(function(){function e(){window.addEventListener(`message`,function(e){if(e.data[`datawrapper-height`]!==void 0){var t=document.querySelectorAll(`iframe`);for(var n in e.data[`datawrapper-height`])for(var r=0,i;i=t[r];r++)if(i.contentWindow===e.source){var a=e.data[`datawrapper-height`][n]+`px`;i.style.height=a}}})}e()})();The Lucknow complaint of November 2022 was brought under sections 153A and 505 of the Indian Penal Code rather than the defamation provisions, and is included here because it belongs to the same run of prosecutions. A further complaint over the same Rafale tweet has been reported from Gurgaon, and is left out because neither the complainant nor any order in it could be traced. Where a row ends in “Pending”, no order later than the one described could be traced. Status as reported up to October 13, 2026.Source: summoning and quashing orders, and contemporaneous reports of each hearing, linked from the court named in the first column.It is fair to ask why Gandhi should receive what ordinary accused do not. A trader or a reporter in the same magistrate’s court waits years for a stay that may never come. That inequality argues for a rule of general application rather than relief case by case.The Wire has its own stake in the answer. Amita Singh then chaired the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University. She complained in 2016 about a report published in The Wire that named her as the force behind a dossier on the university. The dossier was titled Jawaharlal Nehru University: The Den of Secessionism and Terrorism. She denies writing it, and JNU has told the courts that it received no such document. Ten years and two rounds of summons later, that case has produced one judicial remark and no rule.A ruling on who may complain would do more than clear Gandhi’s diary of hearings. It would tell every magistrate in the country whether a party worker can prosecute an insult aimed at the leader. The answer decides whether a political party can convert every rally speech into a complaint, filed in any district where the speech was heard. Until that ruling comes, the stay is the only law, and it is renewed four weeks at a time.V. Venkatesan is a contributing editor at Supreme Court Observer.