Jammu: The Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh High Court here on Wednesday quashed a police FIR registered against Kashmiri Pandit activist Sushil Pandit for his three year old tweet about the killing of five CRPF personnel during Ramazan ceasefire in 2018.
Pandit had in 2018 tweeted “just heard, five CRPF jawans martyred in Pampore. # Ramzan ceasefire is working. Question is who is it working for?’’ However, as soon as he found it to be fake, he immediately deleted his tweet.
Holding that “this court is of the considered view that the FIR impugned, is nothing but an abuse of the process of law’’, Justice Rajnesh Oswal while referring to various supreme court judgments observed that “in order to invoke section 505 RPC, a person must make, publish or circulate any statement, rumour or report with intent to cause, or which is likely to cause any officer, soldier, sailor or Airman in the Army, Navy or Air Force of India to mutiny or otherwise disregard or fail in his duty, or with intent to cause, or which is likely to cause fear or alarm to the public or to any section of the public whereby any person may be induced to commit an offence against the State or against the public tranquility or with an intent to incite, or which is likely to incite any class or community of persons to commit any offence against any other class or community’’.
The intention to generate the consequences as envisaged by section 505 RPC must be forthcoming from the plain reading of the statement/report or rumour and should not left at the discretion of a particular person, he observed.
“A perusal of the petitioner’s tweet would reveal that it begins with words “JUST HEARD”, meaning thereby that what was uploaded by him was just heard by him and he had no personal knowledge of the same,’’ observed Justice Oswal, adding that “further the act of the petitioner in deleting the said tweet has not been disputed/denied by the respondents and this subsequent conduct of the petitioner also makes it ample clear that the said tweet was uploaded in a good faith without any criminal intention to generate the consequences as provided by section 505 RPC’’.
At the most from the tweet in question, it can be inferred that the petitioner was not in favour of the ceasefire during the holy month of Ramzan but the same can, by no means can be construed to be an act on the part of the petitioner to generate the consequences as envisaged by the section 505 RPC. As such the essential ingredients of offence under section 505RPC are lacking in the FIR, he held and quashed the FIR.
Sushil Pandit had filed a petition under section 561-A (now 482) through advocate Ankur Sharma submitted that the petitioner was not aware that his “accidental tweet’’ was probably saved by some persons who would later on use it for their political end to harass him. It also stated that after sometime while the petitioner was checking his twitter, he was surprised to see that the ex-Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir who used the tweet of the petitioner as prop on his own tweet.
The ex-Chief Minister gave the intentional communal meaning to the tweet of the petitioner, it said, adding that if latter’s tweet is taken on its face value to be true, it does not carry any communal inflammatory language, which can create or spread communal hatred between two religious communities.
However, SHO Police Station, Pampore, under some political pressure or out of the pressure created by Ex-Chief Minister’s tweet, lodged an FIR under section 505 RPC against the petitioner, the petition said and sought quashing of the said FIR primarily on the ground that it does not disclose commission of any offence including the offence under section 505 RPC.
The respondents including the state of J&K and SHO Pampore Police Station, however, stated that the act of the petitioner besides creating fear psychosis and chaos among the security forces deployed in the Valley, also demoralized them and also instilled sense of insecurity in the general public. They further said that high degree of responsible behavior was expected from the petitioner and was supposed to scrutinize the facts before making the same public but the petitioner has failed to exhibit the said responsible standard and further it is stated that the petitioner cannot be allowed to claim the protection of an exception appended to section 505 RPC.
