The Supreme Court granted interim bail to Congress spokesperson Pawan Khera hours after he was dramatically deplaned at Delhi airport and detained by Assam police on an FIR accusing him of replacing ‘Damodardas’ with ‘Gautamdas’ in PM Narendra Modi’s name to emphasize the opposition’s accusations that the government had connections with industrialist Gautam Adani.
A special bench of CJI D Y Chandrachud and Justices M R Shah and P S Narasimha, constituted within 30 minutes of senior advocate A M Singhvi seeking urgent hearing on Khera’s petition for quashing of FIRs lodged against him at Haflong in Assam, and Lucknow and Varanasi in UP, ordered his immediate release but refused to quash the FIRs while deprecating his utterances.
The court said “Some level has to be maintained in public speeches.” Even Khera’s counsel disapproved of the language. Khera tendered an unconditional apology for his mistake. Singhvi said he had been the main Congress spokesperson for years and would not stand by use of such inappropriate language.
The bench watched the video clip of Khera’s press conference at Mumbai on February 17, where he was heard saying Narendra Gautamdas Modi, despite someone prompting him to say ‘Damodardas’ instead. After that he was heard asking, “Is it Gautamdas or Damodardas?” Additional solicitor general Aishwarya Bhati said it was a clear case of insulting the country’s elected PM and abide to cause breach of public peace by inciting mischief through peddling lies.
When the bench elucidated that the FIRs could not be quashed in a petition filed directly in the SC crutched on Article 32 of the Constitution, Singhvi said arresting a person in a democracy for utterances, howsoever deplorable and avoidable these may be, would ring the death knell for the right to free speech.