Forwarding Fake News without intent to Incite Enmity or Create Alarm not an offence under Section 353 BNS, says HC while quashing FIR against BRS Leaders

Recently, the Telangana High Court examined whether merely forwarding allegedly false news on Twitter, without creating it, can attract criminal liability under Sections 353(1)(c) and 353(2) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita. The case arose from an FIR at Nakrekal Police Station against two BRS leaders accused of sharing posts linking a Congress leader to the SSC paper leak, raising concerns over misuse of criminal law and multiple FIRs for the same incident.

The controversy began when the second respondent, a Congress party leader from the BC (Yadav) community, filed a complaint alleging that certain YouTube channels and T-News had telecast fabricated reports falsely depicting her as an associate of one Guduguntla Shankar, a private teacher arrested in connection with the high-profile SSC paper leakage case. She alleged that BRS party leaders and social media in-charges then amplified this fake news by forwarding it on Twitter without verification, thereby damaging her reputation, derailing her political career, and causing her significant mental distress, resulting in the registration of FIR against the petitioners.

Counsel for the petitioners forcefully argued before the Court that the entire prosecution was a politically motivated attempt to divert public attention from the paper leakage controversy, pointing out that the petitioners had neither created nor originated the content in question, that forwarding news on social media does not ipso facto constitute a criminal act, and that no mens rea, the essential guilty mind, could be attributed to them for merely sharing existing content. Most critically, counsel highlighted that this Court had already quashed an identical FIR arising from the very same incident against another accused by order dated September 9, 2025, and that registration of multiple FIRs for a single incident is an abuse of process impermissible in law.

The State, in opposition, maintained that the accused had acted with deliberate intent to damage the complainant's reputation, that witnesses had been examined and incriminating social media posts collected during investigation, and that the FIR could not be quashed at the threshold when investigation was still underway.

The High Court, after examining the rival submissions and the material on record, found the State's position difficult to sustain in light of its own earlier ruling. The Court noted that an identical issue had already been authoritatively decided by it in Criminal Petition Nos. 8965, 8966 and 8989 of 2025 by a common order dated September 9, 2025, wherein it was categorically held that the alleged Twitter posts relating to the SSC paper leakage case disclosed no intention to incite enmity between communities, nor did they create any fear or alarm capable of disturbing public tranquility, thereby failing to satisfy the essential statutory ingredients of Section 353 BNS.

Applying that reasoning squarely to the present case, the Court held that even proceeding on the assumption that the petitioners had forwarded the posts in question, "the alleged posts, even if assumed to be made by the petitioners, do not satisfy the statutory requirements of Section 353 BNS", and that permitting the proceedings to continue in the face of this finding would amount to nothing less than an abuse of the process of law.

Anchoring its conclusion further in the Supreme Court's binding precedent in T.T. Antony v. State of Kerala and its own ruling in Jakka Vinod Kumar Reddy v. State of Telangana on the impermissibility of multiple FIRs for the same incident, the Court allowed the criminal petition and quashed all proceedings against the petitioners in FIR before Nakrekal Police Station.