Satya prakash
Tribune news service
New Delhi, December 7
On Monday, the Supreme Court refused to overturn the FIRs against Amish television news anchor Devgan for his alleged defamatory comment against Sufi saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti, but said the protection from arrest granted to him would continue if he cooperated with the investigation.
“Having given our careful and in-depth consideration, we do not believe that it is appropriate at this stage to annul the FIRs and thus stop the investigation of all relevant aspects,” said a bench of justice AM Khanwilkar and Judge Sanjiv Khanna.
The bank, however, struck the seven FIRs filed against Devgan in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Telangana to Ajmer in Rajasthan. Likewise, it asked the declared interested parties “to examine the perception of threat from the petitioner and his next of kin and take the appropriate measures that are necessary.”
Devgan had sought the complaint of all the cases against him for what he described as an “inadvertent mistake” to pronounce “Chishti” instead of “Khilji” on a televised program on June 15. He had issued a clarification and apologized for the slip. Such errors cannot be treated as crimes, he had submitted.
It said, “’Hate speech’ has no legitimate or redemptive purpose other than hatred of a particular group. A post that contains unnecessary excerpts that appear to have no real purpose other than to discredit will tend to show that the posts were written with malicious intent. However, opinions may not reflect bad faith intent. “
Citing an article by Alice E. Marwick and Ross Miller of Fordham University, New York, the Bank said that there were three distinct elements that legislatures and courts can use to define and identify ‘hate speech’, namely: element based on content, intent – Element based on damage and element based on damage (or element based on impact).
However, he said that “the three elements are not hermetic silos and they overlap and are interconnected and linked. Only when they are present do they produce a structural continuity to constitute ‘hate speech’ ”.
“Every right and indulgence has a limit. Furthermore, when the criminal act creates public disorder and violence, either alone or with others, then the ‘who’ aspect and the leniency issue would lose meaning and could have little consequence, ”the higher court said.
On the importance of tolerance, the Bank said: “Tolerance is being fair to allow a reasonable consensus to emerge despite differences. In essence, it implies the non-discrimination of individuals or groups, but without denying the right to disagree and disapprove of beliefs and behaviors ”.
The Bank, however, noted: “Political discourse related to government policies requires greater protection for the preservation and promotion of democracy. The falsity of the accusation would not be enough to constitute a crime of ‘hate speech’ ”.
He said: “Therefore, anti-democratic discourse in general and extremist political discourse in particular, which has no useful purpose, if and only when it has the nature of incitement to violence that it ‘creates’, or is’ likely to believe ‘or’ promotes’ or is’ likely to promote ‘public disorder, it would not be protected. “
The court recognized that “in many ways, freedom of expression has empowered those who were marginalized and discriminated against, and therefore it would be completely wrong and wrong to assume that freedom of expression is an elite concept and indulgence.”
Adding a caveat to the treatment of historical events, the high court said: “Historical truth must be described without revealing or in any way encouraging hatred or enmity between different classes or communities.”
