The Sessions Court recently dismissed a defamation complaint filed by deputy commissioner of police Abhishek Trimukhe against Republic TV editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami, his wife and ARG Outlier Media Pvt. Ltd. The Court helt that the complaint filed was not in confirmation with the law prescribed.
In an order released earlier this week, Sessions Judge Uday Padwal said Trimukhe’s complaint was not according to Section 199 of CrPC. As per the said law, the public prosecutor has to be the complainant, which was not so in Trimukhe’s case where he was listed as the complainant.
“The sanction to make a complaint is also given to the public prosecutor and not to Shri. Trimukhe. Therefore, the present complaint ought to have been made by the public prosecutor alone, which is not the case here,” the Court observed while dismissing the complaint.
The Court said that “He has the remedy to make a complaint before the competent magistrate. His filing the complaint even through the public prosecutor, however, would not confer any jurisdiction on this court to take cognizance of the alleged offence".
In his complaint filed on Feb 2, Trimukhe alleged that Goswami made several defamatory statements against him during a panel discussion pertaining to the phone records of actor Rhea Chakraborty, in connection with actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s death on June 14, 2020. Trimukhe claimed that the discussion was posted on the company’s YouTube channel on Aug 7 the same year.
The Police officer claimed that the same content was also published on the microblogging platform, Twitter, by Goswami later on.
The Complaint states that “Accused No. 1 (Goswami) has published several defamatory tweets and has essentially reiterated and re-circulated the contents of the defamatory telecast to an even larger audience by means of Twitter. The tweets are without context and have been wilfully circulated to damage the complainant’s reputation".
The Complaint reads, “The accused persons are well aware that investigation into the death of late Mr. Sushant Sing Rajput (being a well-known Bollywood star) will garner significant public interest. The accused persons, instead of conducting themselves as responsible journalists (self-proclaimed) / citizens, have chosen to profit from the situation by sensationalising and scandalising the same, and using Mr Sushant Singh Rajput’s death and photograph (by tagging him) to disseminate the story to as many people as possible, all the while intending to defame the complainant".
Source Link
Picture Source :
