I’m not scared, am Indira Gandhi’s daughter-in-law: Sonia Gandhi

High Court has also declined to grant Rahul and Sonia Gandhi exemption from personal appearance before trial court in the matter.

“I am not afraid of anyone, why should be I upset”, Sonia Gandhi told Aaj Tak today when asked whether she was upset over a Delhi court’s order to appear before it alongwith her son Rahul in the National Herald case.

“This court is of the considered view that the gravity of the allegations levelled against petitioners has a fraudulent flavour involving a national political party and so, serious imputations smacking of criminality levelled against petitioners need to be properly looked into”, said the court.

The Congress might seek an adjournment in the case in the court.

The court, in its judgement, has additionally questioned the necessity for extending curiosity-free mortgage to Associated Journals Ltd (AJL) the publishers of National Herald.

Gomti Manocha, Metropolitan Magistrate who earlier issued summon to the Congress president and the vice president has been transferred and new magistrate will be apprised of the case developments.

According to Swamy, this amounted to breach of trust and cheating. He has alleged that the Congress leaders lent Rs 90 crore out of tax exempted money to the newspaper and violated the law to acquire it for Rs 50 lakh with the intention of grabbing its properties in Delhi worth thousands of crores.

Filing the plea in the high court, the Congress leaders had said Swamy was a political opponent and the present criminal proceedings were initiated only with an intent to secure an oblique political objective. The objection to summoning of Pitroda and Fernandes on the ground that they reside outside territorial jurisdiction of the trial court was rejected by the high court by terming it as “hyper-technical”.

Meanwhile, Swamy said he has filed a caveat in the apex court to pre-empt any ex-parte order on the appeals likely to be moved by them.

The magistrate, however, told the defence counsel to ensure that all the accused appear before the court on the next date of hearing on December 19. The court saw our request for exemption.

Reiterating that that was a case of “political vendetta” at its worst, Singhvi accused senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Dr Subramanian Swamy and the ruling party of using proxy litigation to attack senior Congress leaders out of “political malice”.

“We have an unassailable extremely strong case”. It claimed “several legal deficiencies” in the verdict. “Why should I be scared?”, she said here.