Delhi HC Drops Contempt Charge Against S. Gurumurthy After He Agrees to Retweet Apology
New Delhi: The Delhi high court on Monday dropped contempt proceedings against S. Gurumurthy, editor of a Chennai-based Tamil news magazine and part-time director of the Reserve Bank of India, for having retweeted an article against Justice S. Muralidhar.
The court closed the proceedings against Swaminathan Gurumurthy, the editor of the weekly magazine Thuglak, after he agreed to re-tweet the apology of an author, who had earlier written the offending article and later apologised.
A bench of Justices Manmohan and Sangita Dhingra Sehgal was informed by the counsel for Gurumurthy that he will mention on his Twitter handle that the author of the objectionable article, which he had re-tweeted, has tendered unconditional apology to the court.
He will also mention that the author has withdrawn the article against Justice Muralidhar and will also re-tweet the hyperlink of the apology tendered by the author.
The court accepted the statement made by senior advocate Mahesh Jethmalani, representing Gurumurthy, and said the scribe is bound by the same.
"In view of this, the name of S. Gurumurthy is dropped from the list of parties," the bench said.
Jethmalani submitted that Gurumurthy had merely re-tweeted the offending article without making any comments and so, he could not be held guilty under the Contempt of Court Act.
Meanwhile, the court issued fresh notices to several respondents, including film maker Vivek Agnihotri and Anand Ranganathan, to respond as to why contempt action be not initiated against them in the matter. They had also tweeted/ re-tweeted certain remarks.
The author of the offending article, Desh Kapoor had in August tendered apology to the court and deleted the objectionable portion and was dropped as a party in the case.
The contempt proceedings were initiated by the high court last year.
After the high court division bench headed by Justice Muralidhar passed the order on October 1, 2018, releasing rights activists Gautam Navlakha from house arrest in the Bhima Koregaon violence case, Gurumurthy had tweeted alleging bias by Justice Muralidhar.
The high court, which took up the matter after receiving a letter from advocate Rajshekhar Rao who sought contempt action against Gurumurthy, had said the tweets and online video making allegations against the judge be taken down.
Rao, in his letter, has stated that the tweet was a deliberate attempt to attack a sitting high court judge.
In March last year, the high court had dubbed as "mischievous" certain tweets by the journalist in connection with its decision granting interim protection from arrest to Karti Chidambaram, son of senior Congress leader P. Chidambaram in the INX Media money laundering case.
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