Making false statements in an article, by itself, is not an offence under Section 153A of the Indian Penal Code, the Supreme Court said on Friday.
The top court’s comment comes in the wake of a petition challenging the FIRs that were lodged against Editors Guild of India members over a report on the ethnic violence that has plagued Manipur.
A case had been filed against the president of the Editors Guild of India (EGI) and three members of the guild’s fact-finding team, which had gone to Manipur to assess the media’s reportage of the ethnic conflict in the state. The complainant had alleged that the report submitted by the team was “false, fabricated and sponsored”, and the charges in the first information report included promoting enmity between different groups.
The court wondered how mere submission of a report could constitute a crime and said the crime of promoting enmity between groups, as mentioned in the FIR, is not borne out.
‘‘There is no whisper of crime in the complaint based on which the FIR has been registered,” a bench of Chief Justice of India (CJI) DY Chandrachud and Justices JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra said during the hearing on Friday, even as it extended by two weeks the protection from coercive action it has granted to four members of the EGI in connection with the two FIRs lodged against them.
