Chowkidar Chor Hai remark: SC closes contempt case against Rahul Gandhi with a word of caution

New Delhi, Nov 14: The Supreme Court has closed the contempt case against Rahul Gandhi in which he attributed his remark, Chowkidar Chor Hai to the Rafale judgment of the Supreme Court.

The court said that Rahul Gandhi needs to be more careful in future for attributing to the court his remarks. While closing the contempt case against Rahul Gandhi, the SC said that he should be more careful in future. He uttered the words, Chowkidar Chor Hai, without even reading the Rafale judgment of the Supreme Court dated December 2018.

The criminal contempt petition was filed by BJP MP Meenakshi Lekhi. The top court had earlier rejected the plea of Gandhi to close the criminal contempt petition filed by Lekhi.

Rahul Gandhi had told the Supreme Court that he has already tendered an unconditional apology for wrongly attributing to it his "chowkidar chor hai" remark against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the criminal contempt proceedings against him be closed.

Senior advocate A M Singhvi, appearing for Gandhi, told the bench, also comprising Justices S K Kaul and K M Joseph, that the Congress president has already tendered unconditional apology and has expressed regret over the wrongful attribution to the apex court.

Senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi, appearing for Lekhi, told the bench that the apology tendered by Gandhi should be rejected and action must be taken against him as per the law.

Rohatgi also argued that the court should ask Gandhi to make an apology to the public for his remarks.

Gandhi had on May 8 tendered unconditional apology in the apex court for wrongfully attributing to it his "chowkidar chor hai" remark in the Rafale verdict and said that he holds the top court in the "highest esteem and respect" and any attributions to it were "entirely unintentional, non-wilful and inadvertent".

The three-page affidavit was filed by the Congress president after he had drawn flak from the apex court on April 30 over his earlier affidavit in which he had not directly admitted his mistake for incorrectly attributing the allegedly contemptuous remark to the top court.

The court on April 15 had given a categorical clarification that in its Rafale verdict there was no occasion for it to make a mention of the contemptuous observation that "chowkidar Narendra Modi chor hain" as has been attributed to it by Gandhi.

Gandhi, in his explanation filed in the court earlier, had said that his statement was made in the "heat of political campaigning" and there was not the "slightest intention to insinuate" anything regarding the Supreme Court proceedings in any manner.

He had said that his April 10 statement was made in a purely political context to counter the "misinformation campaign" being led by senior BJP functionaries as well as the government that the Supreme Court verdict of December 14 last year was a "clean chit" to the Centre regarding all the aspects of the Rafale deal.