“Inadvertent Mistake”: SC Says Contempt Proceedings Not Initiated Against Rajdeep Sardesai

The SC website, earlier on Tuesday, showed that the Supreme Court has registered a suo motu contempt case against Sardesai for his tweets about the judiciary.

According to LiveLaw, unidentified officials in the Supreme Court on Tuesday clarified that no suo motu contempt case proceedings have been initiated against journalist Rajdeep Sardesai. The status of the case seen on the Supreme Court website as Suo Moto Case(Criminal) 2/2020 (the case against Sardesai) was placed “inadvertently”, they said.

They said that appropriate action to rectify the same is under process. The SC website, earlier on Tuesday, showed that the Supreme Court has registered a suo motu contempt case against Sardesai for his tweets about the judiciary.

Petitioner Aastha Khurana had filed the complaint in the question. Five months after Attorney General KK Venugopal refused to initiate criminal proceedings against the journalist on the basis of the same complaint, the case was registered by the petitioner. The petitioner, following Venugopal’s decision in September, filed the case in the Supreme Court, which was seen as registered as a suo motu complaint on the website.

The petitioner referred to Mr Sardesai’s tweets from July and August.

The journalist had made the tweets in August in relation to the contempt case of lawyer Prashant Bhushan, where Bhushan was fined Re 1. The India Today anchor, taking a dig at the Supreme Court’s decision to fine Bhushan Re 1, had said that the court wanted to avoid an “embarrassing” situation it had created for itself. Another Sardeasai’s tweet on August 14 compared the verdict in Bhushan’s case to the habeas corpus petitions of those detained in Jammu and Kashmir.

Breaking: Rs 1 token fine imposed by SC on @pbhushan1 in contempt case.. if he doesn’t pay it, then 3 months jail sentence! Clearly, court looking to wriggle out of an embarrassment of its own making.

— Rajdeep Sardesai (@sardesairajdeep) August 31, 2020

In another tweet from July, Mr Sardesai allegedly cast aspersions about former Supreme Court Justice Arun Mishra, who had heard Bhushan’s contempt case. Though Mr Sardesai reportedly deleted the tweet later, the petitioner claimed that it had received “huge media publicity” and raised questions on the “fairness of the court”.