Film director Vivek Agnihotri submitted an unconditional apology to the Delhi High Court in a matter of contempt of court case over his allegations on a judge that he was biased while releasing the activist Gautam Navlakha of the Bhima Koregaon violence case.
Court however, underlined its order and asked him to appear for hearing and show remorse in person.
Justice Siddharth Mridul and Talwant Singh informed the same to his lawyer and said that remorse cannot always be expressed through an affidavit that is in writing and hence he must not have any difficulty to express remorse in person.
The contempt of court proceedings had been initiated by the court against Vivek Agnihotri, Anand Ranganathan and the news portal Swaraj after their remarks against the decision of Justice S Muralidhar, the Chief Justice of Orissa High Court.
In the last hearing, Vivek Agnihotri was asked to be present in the court in person on March 16 .
The filmmaker recently directed the controversial, The Kashmir Files
Court asks Agnihotri to show remorse in person.
He submitted a written apology in the form of an affidavit through his lawyers and also stated that he had already deleted the tweet in contention.
However, as per the Amicus Curiae appointed by the court to assist it in the case, said that the tweet was not deleted rather it was taken down by Twitter.
The remarks by Agnihotri, insinuated that the judge was biased in his decision of quashing Navlakha‘s house arrest, order and transit remand as he had some kind of associations with his family.
S Gurumurthy, another RSS ideologue was also put under question for his remarks but was later released from the case after he made an apology.
The court had earlier directed two other social media platforms to block the web links of articles spreading the allegations against the Judge.
Court asks Agnihotri to show remorse in person.
This was in response to a letter to the court by senior advocate Rajshekar Rao alleging that Agnihotri’s tweet was a deliberate attack on the High Court Judge leading to contempt of court.
Navlakha was arrested back in 2020 and is currently under house arrest on the case regarding the inflammatory speeches he made at the Elgar Parishad conference held in Pune in 2017, which is said to have triggered the violence near the Bhima Koregaon War Memorial.
