India’s opposition Congress party president Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi were granted bail after appearing in a court on Saturday in connection with a corruption case, their lawyer, R. S. Cheema, told CNN’s New Delhi bureau.
The lawsuit against the Gandhis had been filed by Subramanian Swamy, a politician of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP. Swamy accused the Gandhis and some other Congress party leaders of illegally acquiring assets of the now-shut National Herald English-language newspaper, a charge the defendants deny. They have claimed the lawsuit is politically motivated. Swamy holds firm that the Gandhis misused their party funds to acquire the newspaper’s real estate, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. “They refuted the allegations in their bail application,” Cheema, the Gandhis’ lawyer said.
Rahul and Sonia Gandhi are part of a political dynasty that stretches back to independent India’s founding.
Rahul Gandhi, the vice president of the Congress party, is a great-grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. Rahul is also a grandson of slain Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. His father was former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was assassinated by a suicide bomber in 1991.
The National Herald newspaper was set up by Nehru in 1938, nine years before he became prime minister.
The Congress party has been the governing party for much of independent India’s history, but it lost to the BJP and current Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the 2014 elections.