Kunal Kamra faces contempt cases for his tweets attacking the Supreme Court. (Archive)
New Delhi:
Twitter was reportedly challenged today by a parliamentary panel for failing to remove “offensive tweets” by comedian Kunal Kamra addressed to the Supreme Court earlier this month.
The social media giant’s head of policy, Mahima Kaul, was questioned by the Joint Committee on the Personal Data Protection Bill headed by Meenakshi Lekhi of the BJP, the sources said.
Both Ms Lekhi and Congressional Leader Vivek Tankha took the lead in questioning Twitter for keeping the posts, the sources said.
Twitter is already in trouble for geo-tagging Ladakh as part of China and has promised the panel that it will be corrected on November 30. Twitter’s chief privacy officer, Damien Kieran, sent a letter of apology to the panel for the lapse, which was revealed after users tagged their posts as Ladakh, but the geotag showed their location in China.
Kunal Kamra faces contempt cases for his tweets attacking the Supreme Court for granting television host Arnab Goswami a clemency after his arrest in an incitement to the suicide case. Eight people, mostly lawyers, have filed cases against him.
The Mumbai comic has refused to retract its tweets or apologize for its posts. “I do not intend to retract my tweets or apologize for them. I think they speak for themselves … No lawyers, no apologies, no fines, no waste of space,” he wrote in tweets.
Kamra filled his timeline with angry and caustic posts against the Supreme Court for granting Arnab Goswami provisional bail a week after his arrest for the suicide of an architect, Anvay Naik, and his mother in 2018. Justices DY Chandrachud e Indira Banerjee stopped the Maharashtra government on the arrest of the Republic TV presenter and said: “If we, as a constitutional court, do not establish the law and protect freedom, who will?”
Attorney General KK Venugopal, by allowing criminal contempt cases against Kamra, said in a letter that he had crossed the line. “It is time for the people to understand that attacking the Supreme Court in an unjustified and brazen manner will lead to punishment,” the chief judicial official had said in a letter.
The comedian’s fight with Arnab Goswami began after several airlines banned him for disrupting the anchor on an IndiGo flight from Mumbai to Lucknow. He then posted a video of the encounter, in which he was seen bombarding the Republic editor with questions and no response.
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