AHMEDABAD: Terming Congress leader Rahul Gandhi's conviction in a criminal defamation case over his remark on the 'Modi surname' as 'just, proper and legal' the Gujarat high court today dismissed his plea seeking a stay. 

The judgement to uphold the lower court order was passed by Justice Hemant Prachchhak who noted that Gandhi was already facing 10 criminal cases across India.  The judge observed, "Representatives of the people should be men of clear antecedents and it is now the need of the hour to have purity in politics." 

He also noted that after the said complaint in which he was convicted, another complaint was filed in a court in Pune by the grandson of Veer Savarkar for Rahul Gandhi's defamatory utterance against Veer Savarkar at Cambridge. "Yet another complaint against him was filed in the concerned court of Lucknow," he noted.  "In this backdrop, refusal of stay on conviction would not in any way result in injustice to the applicant," the judge said.

The case was filed by Bharatiya Janata Party's Surat West MLA and former minister in the Gujarat government Purnesh Modi in 2019 over Rahul Gandhi's remark at an election rally at Kolar in Karnataka on April 13, 2019, where he had remarked, "How come all thieves have Modi as the common surname?" Purnesh 

Modi has alleged that Rahul Gandhi defamed the Modi community when he allegedly compared PM Narendra Modi to economic offenders Nirav Modi and Lalit Modi.

The Gujarat High Court had stayed the proceedings in March 2022 after Purnesh Modi moved a petition seeking a stay on the proceedings before the Surat trial court, primarily on the ground of lack of sufficient evidence. However, in February this year Modi withdrew his petition seeking a stay on the trial court proceedings and the high court on February 16 vacated the stay on the criminal defamation proceedings against Rahul Gandhi on March 23 a metropolitan magistrate's court in Surat had sentenced him to two years in jail.

Rahul Gandhi was convicted under Indian Penal Code (IPC) sections 499 and 500 (criminal defamation) and handed him the two years jail sentence following which under the provisions of the Representation of the People Act, he was disqualified as a Member of Parliament (MP) Lok Sabha from Wayanad which he had won in 2019.