BREAKING| Supreme Court Protects Zee News Anchor Rohit Ranjan From Coercive Action In Multiple FIRs Over Rahul Gandhi's Doctored Video

The vacation bench of Justices Indira Banerjee and JK Maheshwari passed an interim order restraining respondent authorities from taking coercive steps to take Ranjan into custody in connection with the telecast of DNA show on July 1, 2022.

The bench was considering writ preferred by Ranjan, stating that the alleged video was received from a third party agency namely ANI and upon realizing that the contents of the show contained certain factual inaccuracies and unintentional error, Zee News immediately retracted the news segment, apologized on air and deleted all social media posts qua the said news segment.

Senior Advocate Siddharth Luthra appearing for Ranjan submitted that since multiple FIRs for the same offence have been registered, the TT Antony case will apply which held that there can be no second FIR and consequently there can be no fresh investigation on receipt of every subsequent information in respect of the same cognizable offence or the same occurrence or incident giving rise to one or more cognizable offences.

Zee News Anchor in the petition had further contended that he apologised for the errors in the said show and expressed utmost regret on his prime time show, DNA as well on his Twitter Handle, but subsequently multiple FIRs/ Complaints were filed against the him under various provisions of law for the same incident, even though the error was unintentional.

It was argued in the petition that multiple FIR's arising out of the same cause of action were not permissible under law and that the issue was covered under the provisions of Section 16 and 17 of the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act, 1995 and Programming Rules against the broadcaster.

"Therefore, when there is special law dealing with the issues in question, there was no question to invoke the criminal statute or registration of FIRs. It was accordingly submitted that the multiple FIRs and many more complaints, which are being filed in various states have been registered with a predetermined and premotivated objective to cause undue harassment to the Petitioner and the news channel. Due to numerous FIR's already registered and multiple complaints filed in various states, which may also be converted into FIR's, the Petitioner is being hounded by police from several states for an act which was neither intentional nor motivated and for which an unconditional apology has already been tendered and telecasted," the petition further stated.

The petition was filed through Karanjawala & Co. Senior Advocate Sidharth Luthra appeared for Ranjan. He was briefed by a team from law firm Karanjawala and Co, led by Senior Partner Ruby Singh Ahuja and Partner Samarjit Pattnaik, with Advocates Vikas Gogne, Vishal Gehrana, Irfan Muzamil, Satyam Chaturvedi, Kritika Sachdeva and Varun Khanna

Case Title: Rohit Ranjan v Union of India & Ors| WP(Crl) 257 of 2022

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