Delhi court dismisses Arvind Kejriwal's plea against order summoning him in defamation case

A Delhi court on Wednesday dismissed a plea of Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal against a trial court order summoning him as an accused in a criminal defamation case for re-tweeting an allegedly defamatory video circulated by YouTuber Dhruv Rathee in May 2018.

A magistrate court had summoned Kejriwal to appear before it on August 7 in the criminal complaint of the founder of social media page, 'I Support Narendra Modi', who alleged that the AAP leader had re-tweeted the defamatory video.

The chief minister had challenged the magistrate's order before a sessions court.

"The impugned order (magistrate's order) has dealt with all the relevant aspects of the issues involved at the stage of summoning. At this stage, the court has only to see if there are sufficient grounds to proceed further or not and if the impugned order is weighed on this scale, then I find no illegality, impropriety or irregularity in the order," Special Judge Ajay Kumar Kuhar said.

 

During the hearing, Kejriwal's counsel had told the court that he had not re-tweeted with an intention to cause any harm to the complainant in the case.

"The complaint was politically motivated and and there was no incriminating material against Kejriwal," the counsel said.

The complaint by Vikas Sankrityayan has claimed that the YouTube video with the title 'BJP IT Cell Part II' was circulated by Rathee, who lives in Germany, "wherein number of false and defamatory allegations were made".

Regarding Kejriwal, Sankrityayan said that he re-tweeted the video from his twitter account without checking the authenticity of the video.

"The complainant alleges that the allegations made against him in this video are false, malicious and defamatory and it has lowered the reputation of the complainant in the eyes of right thinking members of the society. So far no proof has been tendered on the allegations," the complaint said.

He said Kejriwal is followed by crores of people "due to which the video has reached to a large number of people not only in India but also internationally".