The Supreme Court on Friday granted protection from arrest to Zee News anchor Rohit Ranjan on his plea for quashing of multiple FIRs or clubbing those with a single case for inadvertently running an alleged doctored video of Rahul Gandhi.
A bench of Justices Indira Banerjee and J K Maheshwari issued notice to the Union Government and others on the writ petition by Ranjan.
After hearing senior advocate Sidharth Luthra on behalf of the petitioner, the top court directed the authorities not to arrest or take any coercive action against him.
On Tuesday, Noida police had arrested Ranjan and released him on bail. However, Chhattisgarh police tried to arrest him from his Ghaziabad residence.
In a show hosted by Ranjan on July 1, he allegedly presented the doctored video clip of Rahul Gandhi, in which he was heard branding the Udaipur attackers as "children", purportedly justifying the heinous killing of tailor Kanhaiya Lal.
However, the original video had Rahul Gandhi's comments on the SFI attack at his Wayanad office, which was "deliberately and mischievously" doctored to make it appear as if it was a remark on the murder in Udaipur.
In his writ petition, Ranjan said the news show inadvertently misattributed certain quotes and the error was immediately rectified. "An unconditional apology was tendered by the petitioner and Zee News and the show was withdrawn prior to registration of FIRs. However, multiple complaints were filed on "motivated grounds precipitated by malice" though the error was unintentional and almost immediately set right," his plea stated.
The petitioner faced FIRs lodged at Jaipur, Raipur and Noida.
He sought a direction for quashing of FIRs or clubbing of those cases with the FIR lodged at Jaipur and protection against any coercive action.
His plea also pointed out it is a settled law that there cannot be multiple FIRs with regard to the same cause of action.