Delhi High Court Reserves Order On Manoj Tiwari's Plea Against Summons In Manish Sisodia's Defamation Case

The court has also allowed the parties to file their written submissions by the next date.

The defamation case relates to a complaint filed by Sisodia against BJP leaders — Members of Parliament Manoj Tiwari, Hans Raj Hans and Pravesh Verma, MLAs Manjinder Singh Sirsa, Vijender Gupta, and Spokesperson Harish Khurana — for allegedly making defamatory statements of his involvement in corruption of nearly Rs 2,000 crore in the building of classrooms in Delhi's government schools.

Challenging the summons issued by a Rouse Avenue court to Tiwari and other co-accused persons in November last year, Sr. Adv. Pinky Anand's main line of attack on the summons order was that the same was based on a CD which had been relied upon as evidence, even in the absence of a record. She argued that in the absence of a record, the CD was not legally admissible as evidence and that the certificate produced under Section 65B of the Evidence Act, was also "wholly unreliable".

Section 65B. Admissibility of electronic records— (1) Notwithstanding anything contained in this Act, any information contained in an electronic record which is printed on a paper, stored, recorded or copied in optical or magnetic media produced by a computer (hereinafter referred to as the computer output) shall be deemed to be also a document, if the conditions mentioned in this section are satisfied in relation to the information and computer in question and shall be admissible in any proceedings, without further proof or production of the original, as evidence of any contents of the original or of any fact stated therein of which direct evidence would be admissible.

Sub-section 4 of Section 65B of the Evidence Act deals with the requirement of a Certificate accompanying an electronic record, for it to be admissible as evidence. It states that:

(4) In any proceedings where it is desired to give a statement in evidence by virtue of this section, a certificate doing any of the following things, that is to say,—

(a) identifying the electronic record containing the statement and describing the manner in which it was produced;

(b) giving such particulars of any device involved in the production of that electronic record as may be appropriate for the purpose of showing that the electronic record was produced by a computer;

(c) dealing with any of the matters to which the conditions mentioned in sub-section (2) relate, and purporting to be signed by a person occupying a responsible official position in relation to the operation of the relevant device or the management of the relevant activities (whichever is appropriate) shall be evidence of any matter stated in the certificate; and for the purposes of this sub-section it shall be sufficient for a matter to be stated to the best of the knowledge and belief of the person stating it.

Anand also submitted that Sisodia's case had relied on newspaper reports, and that the same could not classify as "good evidence". She said, "You can't pick up a newspaper and say this is good evidence. No newspaper is good evidence, it's not a matter of public record."

The Court then asked her if any testimony of any viewer had been taken on record, upon which the testimony of 1 viewer was pointed out.

Sr. Adv. Vikas Pahwa appearing for Sisodia, on the other hand, pressed that the Section 65B certificate produced in the matter did not suffer from any anomaly and was very well valid. He relied on a judgment by the High Court and argued that it was settled law that this Certificate could be submitted at any stage.

He also argued that the accused persons had not denied at any stage that the press conference had in fact taken place, and if there indeed was any corruption, the accused persons should have filed a criminal complaint.

"If there was any corruption, have they filed any criminal complaint? An RTI doesn't count," he said, referring to one RTI application filed by the accused persons on the corruption charge.

The AAP leader filed the complaint under Section 200 of CrPC r/w for commission of offences under Sections 499, 500 r/w Sections 34 and 35 of the IPC - for making false and defamatory statements in print, electronic and social media.

The accused are out on bail in the matter.