By V. Venkatesan
In December 2021, the Supreme Court asked the Delhi high court to decide expeditiously, “preferably within a period of three months”, a petition seeking criminal action against political leaders accused of making inflammatory speeches in the period surrounding the northeast Delhi riots.
The case remained before the high court for nearly five more years.
On Monday (October 5), the high court dismissed seven petitions, and its reasoning reaches well beyond them. The judgment converts the Supreme Court’s counsel of restraint on hate speech into a working rule of closure for writ courts. Justices Vivek Chaudhary and Manoj Jain reached that result through three steps in reasoning. Each step can be defended on its own, yet together they leave a writ petitioner with very little room.
The bench declined to direct FIRs against politicians accused of inflammatory speeches before the February 2020 violence in north-east Delhi. It also refused an independent probe into the Delhi Police’s conduct, and further orders on evidence and compensation. The reasoning rests on the Supreme Court’s April 29 ruling in Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay v. Union of India. Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta delivered that ruling on a batch of petitions seeking judicial directions against hate speech.
The first move: A precedent read wider than its facts
Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay decided two distinct things: As a matter of principle, it held that existing criminal law covers hate speech and that grievances over unregistered FIRs belong before magistrates. As a matter of fact, it dealt with one complaint, filed by Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI (M)) leader Brinda Karat. That complaint concerned speeches by two Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders: Anurag Thakur’s speech of January 27, 2020, and Parvesh Verma’s of the following day.
The petitions before the high court concerned many more speeches than those two. The lead petition, by Shaikh Mujtaba Farooq, also named BJP leaders Mishra and Abhay Verma. A rival petition, filed by Lawyers Voice, sought FIRs against several opposition figures. It named Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Manish Sisodia, Amanatullah Khan, Waris Pathan, Akbaruddin Owaisi and Mehmood Pracha. None of the speeches attributed to these leaders had been placed before the Supreme Court.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.