‘Political speeches are often exaggerated': Telangana HC quashes criminal defamation against CM Revanth Reddy
On Friday, the Bench of Justice Lakshman allowed the petition filed by Reddy to quash the proceedings against him in the case pending trial before a Special Judicial First Class Magistrate (JFCM) for Excise cases (designated MP-MLA court) in Hyderabad. He was booked under Section 499 (defamation) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Section 125 (promoting enmity between classes in connection with an election) of the Representation of the People Act.
The complainant, Telangana BJP unit represented by its General Secretary Kasam Venkateshwarlu, contended that the statements, such as 'the BJP, if voted to power, would change the Constitution and abolish reservations to SC/ST and BC communities', were part of a 'fake and dubious political narrative' to confuse voters and promote enmity between communities. The BJP alleged that the speech lowered the party's reputation and caused damage during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
The Special JFCM for excise cases in August 2024 had issued a summons to Revanth Reddy, asking him to appear personally before it. Subsequently, the chief minister approached the high court challenging the complaint and seeking to stay the proceedings initiated against him. The high court had earlier granted him an exemption from personal appearance before the trial court.
The petitioner's counsel, T Niranjan Reddy, informed the court that political speeches should not be the subject of defamation, 'as elections inherently involve parties seeking to lower each other's reputation.'
He said the 'alleged speech is a routine activity of a political leader to criticise the opposition and is not defamation,' and that such speeches are protected under Articles 19 and 21 of the Constitution. The petitioner, among other allegations, argued that the complaint was filed with a political vendetta to harass the petitioner and constitutes an abuse of the legal process.
On his part, the counsel for the respondent, Devineni Vijay Kumar, argued that the statements created mistrust and fear among voters, bringing disrepute to the BJP.
After hearing both sides, the court rejected the contention of the petitioner that political parties do not enjoy reputation and cannot maintain a complaint for criminal defamation. The court also found neither the complainant (BJP Telangana) nor its representative, Kasam Venkateshwarlu, was authorised by the national unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party to file the complaint.
Refraining from discussing the contents of the alleged speech and the issue of its defamatory nature, the court noted, 'Political speeches are often exaggerated. To allege that such speeches are defamatory is another exaggeration.'
'It is trite law that, power of quashing should be exercised very sparingly and circumspection and that too in the rarest of rare cases. However, where the initiation of criminal proceedings suffers from material defects or where such criminal proceedings constitute abuse of process, the inherent powers can be exercised to quash criminal proceedings,' the court stated in the order.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Indian Express
32 minutes ago
- Indian Express
AAP slams ‘mismanagement by 4-engine BJP govt' over deaths, water crisis in Delhi amid heavy rain
With heavy rain lashing the Capital on Saturday, deaths of eight persons in two separate incidents, flooding of the Giri Nagar pumping station in South Delhi's Kalkaji halting water supply to several areas, and waterlogging in multiple parts of the city brought the BJP government under criticism from the AAP. Leader of Opposition and former CM Atishi said the flooding of the pumping station left thousands of residents in Kalkaji, Giri Nagar, Govindpuri and Govindpuri Extension facing severe water shortage. 'Mismanagement by the four-engine BJP govt has not only submerged Delhi roads, but caused a water crisis in Kalkaji. The Giri Nagar pumping station is completely submerged. And the people of Giri Nagar, Kalkaji, Govindpuri and Govindpuri Extn are facing several days of water crisis,' she posted on X, along with a copy of her letter to Chief Minister Rekha Gupta. In her letter, Atishi wrote, 'Just a few hours of rain have brought Delhi to a grinding halt. Roads are waterlogged, traffic is at a standstill and even more shocking is that in many parts of Delhi water has entered people's homes. The pumping station of the Giri Nagar UnderGround Reservoir (UGR) is fully submerged in water… So no water is being supplied to the Kalkaji, Giri Nagar, Govindpuri and Govindpuri Extension.' She called the situation 'the direct result of administrative negligence' and urged the Chief Minister to instruct PWD and Water Minister Parvesh Sahib Singh to restore supply immediately. The heavy rain that caused the flooding began late Friday night, with the India Meteorological Department (IMD) upgrading alerts through the early hours of Saturday from yellow to orange and then to a red alert by 6.20 am. By 8.30 am, Safdarjung recorded 78.7 mm of rainfall in the last 24 hours, while Pragati Maidan logged 100.3 mm. The IMD warned of potential waterlogging, traffic congestion, and reduced visibility across the city. The AAP, in an official statement on Saturday evening, also attacked the BJP-led Delhi government over citywide waterlogging. The party's Delhi president Saurabh Bharadwaj alleged 'corruption worth crores in desilting works' and linked it to the Jaitpur incident in which seven people, including two children, died after a wall collapsed amid heavy rain. He further alleged that a 2.5-year-old child drowned in an open manhole, saying, 'I had warned CM Rekha Gupta that opening manholes during rain is a dangerous shortcut.' Senior leader Manish Sisodia, as per the statement, called the Jaitpur incident 'deeply painful' and expressed condolences to the bereaved families. Atishi also posted videos of waterlogged roads in Palam, Dhaula Kuan and Saket, stating, 'On Raksha Bandhan, the entire city is submerged… The collapse of governance under Rekha Gupta's government is preventing brothers from meeting their sisters.' AAP MLAs Sanjeev Jha and Kuldeep Kumar, also questioned the government's claims of monsoon preparedness and blamed the BJP to be responsible for lapses in civic bodies.
United News of India
42 minutes ago
- United News of India
Election Commission delists 334 unrecognised political parties in clean-up drive
New Delhi, Aug 9 (UNI) As a part of a comprehensive and continuous strategy to clean up the electoral system, the Election Commission today delisted 334 Registered Unrecognized Political Parties (RUPPs). According to an official statement, the action was taken after a thorough review. However, the delisted parties have the right to appeal before the Commission within 30 days. As per the press release, under Section 29A of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, there are currently six National Parties, 67 State Parties and 2,854 Registered Unrecognized Political Parties (RUPPs) registered with ECI. The parties recognised as national parties include: Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Communist Party of India (Marxist), Indian National Congress (INC), and the National People's Party (NPP). According to rules, if a registered political party does not contest elections continuously for six years, it is liable to be removed from the list. Additionally, registered parties are required to periodically submit specific details to the Commission. The Commission stated that in June 2025, it had instructed the Chief Electoral Officers (CEOs) of states and union territories to examine 345 RUPPs for compliance with the registration norms. During the verification process, notices were issued to these parties and they were given a chance to present their case. Reports submitted by the CEOs revealed that 334 of these parties were not complying with the registration requirements. The remaining cases have been sent back for further verification. Based on the findings and recommendations of the CEOs, the Commission has removed these 334 RUPPs from the list of registered political parties. As a result, out of the original 2,854 RUPPs, 2,520 now remain on the list. The delisted parties can file an appeal with the Election Commission within 30 days. UNI RBE RN
Time of India
an hour ago
- Time of India
Lobon or noon? The trouble with using language to draw borders
Radio host, novelist and commentator Sandip Roy is the author of Don't Let Him Know. However, his columns are all about letting people know his myriad opinions. There is indeed a 'Bangladeshi' language. But it's not what Delhi police were thinking when they put out a notice looking for interpreters 'proficient in Bangladeshi national language'. Nor is it what BJP IT cell convener Amit Malviya was thinking when he defended the letter saying, 'the official language of Bangladesh is not only phonologically different but also includes dialects like Sylheti that are nearly incomprehensible to Indian Bengalis'. Neither are TMC politicians quite right when they stoutly lay claim to some uniform Bengali language identity spanning West Bengal and Bangladesh extending into Assam and Tripura. There is a difference. The first time I went to Dhaka, about a decade ago, a young man who was showing me around asked if I wanted to go to the museum. But he used the beautifully evocative Bengali word jadughar, house of magic, a word I had almost forgotten. In Kolkata, people like us just said 'museum' even when talking in Bangla. When I told my mother, she said they still speak in Bangla there, here you speak in Benglish. In Bangladesh, a country whose birth pangs were tied to Bangla, language felt far more potent than it did in Kolkata where Bengali, English, Hindi had all become mishmashed into a Radio Mirchi-style khichdi. At the liberation war museum in Dhaka, I saw an old clipping from the Pakistan Observer which declared that Tagore songs were deemed 'against Pakistan's cultural values'. The report's tone was matter of fact. But the headline gave away the shock with a punctuation gasp —Broadcast ban on Tagore! In a strange way what the current furore over Bengali has inadvertently done is re-ignite pride in Bangla as a language at a time when more and more of us have gotten used to not reading a Bengali newspaper, let alone a Bengali book. Memes have flooded social media reminding everyone that Bengali is not a 'foreign language', that it has given us a national anthem and a Nobel laureate; India's only Oscar winner for lifetime achievement Satyajit Ray made most of his films in Bangla. Even Vande Mataram, when read in its entirety, was written in Bengali script in a mix of Sanskrit and Bangla. I spotted a meme showing Rabindranath Tagore delivering a stinging slap to a Delhi police officer while saying, 'This slap is in Unicode Bangla'. Each side has its own political agenda. BJP wants to root out illegal migrants from Bangladesh from electoral rolls. Some of its supporters think they can use language as a quick and dirty way to mark people as the other. The Trinamool Congress wants to frame this as an attack on Bengali as a language rather than on illegal immigration. But this political slugfest has ended up being a fascinating linguistic education for the rest of us. For example, in the last few weeks I have learned that not only were there language martyrs in Bangladesh, eleven people protesting the erasure of the Bengali language were killed in Assam's Barak Valley in 1961. They were Sylheti Bengalis, the dialect Malviya called 'incomprehensible to Indian Bengalis'. The political problem of illegal migration the govt wants to tackle is real. But language remains an ineffective and blunt instrument to tackle it. For example, we keep hearing stories in the USA of Donald Trump supporters calling immigration enforcement on people they hear speaking Spanish in a public space. As a result, immigration raids have swept up US-born Latinos who have served in the US military just because they looked and sounded Latino. Language is not a citizenship ID. Bureaucrats draw borders but language seeps through them. The Bangla I spoke in Kolkata was very different from the Bangla the woman from Midnapore who raised me spoke. Kotiya chhua, little mouse, she called me, words my mother never used. Her Bangla was different as was the Bangla of my great aunts whose families hailed from what is now Bangladesh. We sometimes laughed at each other's peculiar turns of phrase. But there was enough room for all of us under the Bengali umbrella. While WhatsApp forwards claimed an easy language litmus test was to see who calls father 'baba' and who calls him 'abba', the linguistic roots of all these words defy 'otherisation'. Baba comes from Arabic. Abba comes from Aramaic. And while people on this side of the border might call salt 'noon' and on the other side they might say 'lobon', both ultimately trace back to the same Sanskrit root 'lavan'. But then I read an essay in The Aerogram by Californian writer Nazia Islam about a grandmother who used both in the same breath. 'Arre noon/lobon de (give me more salt),' she would say. What will we do with her? But then, is there any room for the salt of the earth in a world of namak harams? Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
