The Punjab and Haryana High Court on Friday denied anticipatory bail to commentator Madhu Kishwar in a case against her for making allegedly misleading claims on social media about Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Bar and Bench reported.
Kishwar had on April 18 shared on her account on social media platform X, or allegedly retweeted, a video purportedly showing Modi. The claim had been debunked and the person seen in the video was not Modi, according to the prosecution. The post was later deleted.
The Chandigarh Police had filed a first information report against her.
Kishwar has been booked under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to defamation, promoting enmity between groups on grounds, doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony, cheating, forgery, forging a document or electronic record and using it as genuine, and making statements conducing to public mischief, Live Law reported.
She has also been booked under provisions of the Information Technology Act.
On Friday, Kishwar said that her application for anticipatory bail had been rejected on what she described as “flimsy grounds”. The FIR was politically motivated and filed in the Union Territory, “which is directly under Union Home Minister Amit Shah”, she alleged.
This had made it “very tough to find a lawyer” to argue her case, she claimed.
The case
On Friday, Justice Aman Chaudhary said that Kishwar had not cooperated with the investigating agency as she had failed to appear before the police despite repeated notices, Bar and Bench reported.
The court observed that Kishwar was a prominent social media personality and a scholar who could not be presumed to be unaware of the impact of an allegedly misleading post.
The bench noted that while the video had been uploaded on other social media platforms, it was only after Kishwar shared it with her comments that it garnered 1.7 lakh views, the legal news outlet reported.
“Speculations were made of it resembling the holder of a constitutional post, which was confirmed when she further retweeted in that regard...” the court was quoted as having added.
The court also took note of other allegedly objectionable posts by Kishwar, saying that there was an obvious distinction between constructive criticism and posting or trolling to malign someone, cause aspersions and insinuation, Bar and Bench reported.
The “magnitude of the repercussions can be far from that can be fathomed” when such posts are made by someone like the petitioner who has a large following on social media, the court was quoted as saying.
“Such posts can create disharmony, encourage separatist sentiments and put the unity and integrity at peril,” it added.
The court said that Kishwar cannot be granted anticipatory bail as the “modus operandi” in the matter was yet to be found.
The counsel representing Kishwar argued that there had been no ill intent behind her post. They also contended that Kishwar was being wrongly implicated in the matter as that she had merely retweeted the video.
The police argued that Kishwar had not merely retweeted, but had instead downloaded the video shared by another person on another social media platform and then uploaded it on her account. It argued that Kishwar had not only helped in spreading misinformation but also allegedly defamed the image of the head of the government.
Modi government determined to ‘punish me’, claims Kishwar
On Friday, Kishwar said that the status report filed by the prosecution in the matter “is bizarre beyond belief”, adding that her bail application had been rejected “despite legally sound facts presented...to prove that the FIR failed to establish any crime”.
“...I had been forewarned by lawyers in Chandigarh that the Modi govt was determined to ‘teach me a lesson’ and punish me in the severest possible manner to make an example of me for dissenters and critics of the Modi regime,” Kishwar alleged in a social media post.
“Therefore, today’s order denying me protection against political vendetta did not come as a surprise,” she said.
Kishwar said that she will file an appeal before the Supreme Court.
Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.
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