Contempt petition filed in SC against Comic Artist Rachita Taneja for Tweets on Supreme Court

Having obtained the consent of Attorney General K K Venugopal, a law student has approached the Apex Court with a plea for initiating criminal contempt proceedings against comic artist Rachita Taneja for her alleged objectionable tweets against the Supreme Court.

The plea was filed on Saturday after the petitioner received earlier this week the written consent of the Attorney General for initiation of proceedings against her for 3 posts with images which are allegedly outrageous, contemptuous, carry insinuations & deliberately attribute motives to Judges of Supreme Court & their Judgments.

The Contempt plea has been filed by law student Aditya Kashyap through Advocate Namit Saxena. Taneja's posts, the plea said, have gone viral & have been widely shared & subscribed by people attacking the institution of judiciary.

Taneja, being a social media influencer, has thousands of followers across various platforms, it said. Saxena, who is advocate-on-record (AoR), said that the Attorney General in his written consent to initiate criminal contempt proceedings, had stated that these posts are intended to denigrate the Apex Court & lower its authority in the eyes of the public, & thus the cartoons were in contempt of the Supreme Court.

The consent of either the Attorney General or the Solicitor General is necessary, under section 15 of the Contempt of Courts Act, 1971, for initiating contempt proceedings against a person. Criminal contempt of the Supreme Court is punishable with fine up to Rs 2,000 & imprisonment up to 6 months.

Recently, the Top Court had found lawyer-activist Prashant Bhushan guilty of contempt of court for posting two tweets & fined him Re 1 for it. Venugopal in his consent letter to Kashyap for initiating criminal contempt proceedings against Taneja, said, "I am satisfied that each one of the tweets with the cartoons attached to them is in contempt of the Supreme Court of India, & hence I give my consent to initiate proceedings under the Contempt of Courts Act, 1971 in regard to each one of the tweets.

In the petition, details of the three posts & images which are allegedly derogatory & contemptuous have been mentioned. The plea has sought direction that Taneja be restrained from publishing contemptuous posts on social media which scandalise & undermine the authority of the Supreme Court.

The petitioner said the plea highlight three particularly outrageous & contemptuous posts that were crafted, posted & shared by Taneja through her social media handles (@sanitarypanels) on various platforms with the malicious intent of scandalising & lowering the authority of the apex court & to prejudice & interfere with the due course of judicial proceedings. Kashyap is pursuing LLB at Rajiv Gandhi National University of Law in Patiala, Punjab. 

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