Delhi High Court Closes Proceedings Against Anand Ranganathan In Criminal Contempt Case For Tweets Against Justice S Muralidhar

The Delhi High Court on Wednesday closed the criminal contempt proceedings against author Anand Ranganathan in relation to a suo motu case initiated by the court regarding certain tweets made in 2018 against former Justice Muralidhar.

A division bench of Justice Suresh Kumar Kait and Justice Manoj Jain noted that the original initiator of the “contemptuous allegations” against the judge, including editor of Tamil political weekly Thuglak and RSS Ideologue S Gurumurthy S Gurumurthy and filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri, have already been discharged in the matter.

The case related to certain tweets made against Justice Muralidhar in respect of an order passed by him quashing the order of house arrest and transit remand of activist Gautam Navlakha in the Bhima Koregaon case.

While closing proceedings in the suo motu case, the bench noted that that Gurumurthy and Agnihotri were discharged in 2019 and 2023 respectively, after they tendered their unconditional apology which was accepted by the court.

The bench further noted that Ranganathan and other alleged contemnors, who were impleaded in the case later, were not initiator of the contemptous allegations and merely supported the right to speech of those who initiated the tweets.

The court observed that since the initiator of the contemptuous allegations have been discharged in the matter, further initiation of proceedings against other alleged contemnors is a sheer wastage of judicial time.

“Therefore, we hereby close the proceedings,” the court said.

The bench noted that Ranganathan in his affidavit stated that he neither supported the publication tweeted by Gurumurthy but only supported his right to free speech which is enshrined in Article 19 of the Constitution of India.

Furthermore, the court discharged Swarajya magazine after it tendered unconditional apology by way of an affidavit.

Advocate J Sai Deepak appearing for Ranganathan submitted that his client is a free speech absolutist and that he did not comment or post any tweet on the merits of the controversy against the judge. He said that Ranganathan merely supported Gurumurthy's right to comment and not the comment itself.

Furthermore, Deepak said that not even a single tweet was placed on record to show that Ranganathan retweeted the allegedly contemptous tweet or republished the same.

“He is entitled to take the position that he is a free speech absolutist. As long as he does not take the position that I agree on everything what Gurumurthy said in relation to the allegation, he is not in violation of contempt…,” Deepak said.

The proceedings were initiated after Senior Advocate Rajshekhar Rao wrote a letter to the court stating that the tweet was a deliberate attempt to attack a sitting high court judge.

In April last year, the court discharged Filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri, who was another contemner, in the matter after he appeared in person, expressed his remorse and tendered an unconditional apology.

In September 2022, the court had directed to proceed ex parte against Swarajya news portal, Anand Ranganathan and others who did not appear in the matter.

Title: Court In Its Own v. S Gurumurthy

Citation: 2024 LiveLaw (Del) 6