Kangana Ranaut, sister get interim relief till March 22

MUMBAI: The Bombay high court (HC) has extended interim protection against coercive action for actor Kangana Ranaut and her sister Rangoli Chandel, regarding a first information report (FIR) filed against them for alleged hate posts on Twitter.

The court was informed that the documents, filed by the complainant and the police in the HC to oppose the petition filed by Ranaut and Chandel for quashing the FIR, were different from the documents submitted before the metropolitan magistrate court at Bandra, which ordered the registration of the FIR against the sisters on sedition charges.

HC has called for the documents and posted the hearing of the actor’s petition for March 22. A division bench of justice SS Shinde and justice Manish Pitale, while hearing Ranaut’s petition, was informed by advocate Rizwan Siddiquee that the complainant, Munawwar Ali Sayyed, had not followed the procedure for lodging complaints as stipulated in the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC). Siddiquee submitted that Sayyed had approached the magistrate court without informing the nearest police station or higher police authorities.

It was submitted that the magistrate had not taken cognisance of the same and had ordered the registration of the FIR in haste and without application of mind. He added that the documents placed before the HC were not the same as the ones submitted to the magistrate.

However, advocate Rizwan Merchant for Sayyed submitted that a complaint had been sent to the deputy commissioner of police (DCP) of the said zone, after which his client approached the magistrate. He, however, added that there was some problem in the printing of the date on which the complaint was addressed to the DCP.

Siddiquee refuted the argument, stating that he had got the records of the case from the magistrate court under the Right to Information (RTI) Act and it did not have the complaint sent to the DCP, as stipulated under section 153(3) of the CrPC, but the same was submitted before the HC. After hearing the submissions, the court observed that the magistrate should have taken note of whether proper procedure was followed and said that as Ranaut had raised a dispute on the documents submitted before HC and the magistrate, it wanted to scrutinise the documents and hence, called for the records from the magistrate court on or before March 12.

Kangana Ranaut