&w=1024&resize=1024,0&ssl=1 "Comments against PM Modi: SC to hear Shashi Tharoor's plea in defamation case | India News")
The Supreme Court will on Monday hear an appeal by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor against the Delhi High Court ruling that refused to quash the defamation case against him for his alleged “scorpion in Shivlinga” comments directed at the Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Hearing Tharoor's plea on September 10, the high court stayed proceedings before the trial court in the defamation case filed against the Congress MP.
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The high court also issued notices to Delhi Police and BJP leader Rajeev Babbar, who is the complainant in the case, seeking their response to the petition.
According to the October 14 list of causes published on the Supreme Court website, a bench of Justices Hrishikesh Roy and SVN Bhatti will hear Tharoor's plea.
The Congress MP appealed to the high court against the August 29 order of the High Court which refused to quash the defamation case against him.
During the hearing on September 10, Tharoor's lawyer told the high court that the complainant cannot be called an aggrieved party in the case and members of political parties also cannot be called aggrieved parties.
His lawyer argued that Tharoor's comments were protected by the immunity clause of defamation law, which states that any statement made in good faith is not criminal.
The lawyer said Tharoor was referring to an article published in Caravan magazine six years before he made the statement.
The high court expressed surprise that the statement was not defamatory in 2012, when the article was originally published.
“Ultimately, it’s a metaphor. I tried to understand. It refers to the invincibility of the mentioned person (Modi). I don’t know why anyone raised an objection here,” Justice Roy noted during the hearing.
While refusing to quash the case against Tharoor, the High Court initially said the allegations against the Prime Minister such as “scorpion in Shivalinga” were “heinous and deplorable”.
The High Court, which on October 16, 2020 stayed the criminal proceedings on defamation charges against the Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram, set aside the interim order and ordered the parties to appear before the trial court on September 10.
He stated that initially the comment defamed the Prime Minister, the BJP, as well as its leaders and members.
Rejecting Tharoor's plea to quash the defamation case pending in the trial court, the High Court held that the judicial magistrate had sufficient material to summon him under Section 500 (punishment for defamation) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). .
The Congress leader sought to set aside the trial court's April 27, 2019 order summoning him as an accused in the November 2, 2018 criminal defamation complaint filed by Rajeev Babbar.
A criminal complaint was filed against Tharoor in the trial court by Babbar, who alleged that the Congress leader's comments hurt his religious sentiments.
In October 2018, Tharoor claimed that an unnamed RSS leader compared Modi to a “scorpion sitting on a Shivalinga”. The Congress leader said it was an “extremely interesting metaphor”.
(Only the title and image for this report may have been reworked by the Business Standards team; the rest of the content is automatically generated from a distributed feed.)
