The Supreme Court on Monday observed that the time has come to decriminalise defamation as it issued a notice to JNU professor Amita Singh in an appeal challenging the summons to The Wire news portal and its deputy editor in a case filed by the academic.
Singh had filed a defamation suit against the Foundation for Independent Journalism, which runs The Wire, and its deputy editor Ajoy Ashiward Mahaprastha over an article published in 2016 that had alleged that the academic, along with a group of professors, had prepared a dossier that claimed JNU was a “den of organised sex racket” and other wrongdoings.
“Time has now come for decriminalising this… how long will you go on dragging this?” Justice M.M. Sundresh, heading the bench, asked senior advocate Kapil Sibal, representing the media house.
Sibal agreed that the law needed to be decriminalised as a large number of individuals were facing prosecution under it.
The senior counsel told the bench, which also included Justice S.C. Sharma, that the issue was being considered by the Supreme Court in another plea filed by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi.
Criminal defamation cases, which were earlier filed under Section 499 of the IPC and was rechristened as Section 356 under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, entail a jail term of up to two years.
On January 20, the top court stayed the defamation proceedings against Rahul in a trial court in Jharkhand’s Chaibasa. BJP worker Navin Jha had filed the case against the Congress leader for allegedly referring to Union home minister Amit Shah as a
“murderer” and “murder accused” during a 2019 election campaign.
On August 4, 2023, the apex court had stayed Rahul’s conviction in another defamation case filed by BJP leader Purnesh Modi for his alleged remarks at a poll rally in Karnataka in 2019 where he had said: “How come all thieves have Modi as the common surname?”
A bench headed by Justice B.R. Gavai had then noted that neither the trial court nor Gujarat High Court had given any reason for awarding the maximum sentence of two years to the Congress leader, which would have led to his disqualification as an MP under Section 8 of the Representation of the People Act, 1951.
This is the second round of litigation in the matter between Singh and The Wire. On July 24, the top court had set aside a Delhi High Court judgment that quashed the summons issued in the case filed against the portal.
The summons was issued by a judicial magistrate in Delhi against the news portal’s editor and deputy editor for the alleged defamatory article published in April 2016.
The top court had observed that the high court had exceeded its jurisdiction by dealing with the merits of the article. The bench was of the view that the magistrate did not need to examine the merits of the allegations and had rightly issued a summons in the matter.
Accordingly, the apex court, while restoring the matter back to the magistrate, had asked the trial court to proceed with the case uninfluenced by the observations contained in the impugned order passed by the high court.
Subsequently, the matter went back to the trial court, which issued a fresh summons to the media house. The high court on May 7 refused to quash the fresh summons, aggrieved by which the portal filed the appeal on which fresh notice had been issued.