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A single Judge bench of the Delhi High Court today refused to admit an early hearing application filed by Senior advocate Sanjay Hegde in plea against suspension of his Twitter account.

The single judge bench of Justice Rekha Palli refusing the application said that it had more important matters to hear in the day. 

Justice Palli further said that Hegde could do without Twitter and suggested that he could switch to Instagram or any other platform.

On November 5, 2019, Hegde’s Twitter account @sanjayuvacha was permanently suspended. 

In December 2019, Hegde had moved the high court challenging the permanent suspension of his account alleging that the move was “arbitrary”, illegal as contrary to Twitter’s rules.

Hegde’s account was suspended for allegedly re-tweeting two posts on Twitter.

One of the posts was that of Kavita Krishnan, secretary of All India Progressive Women’s Association and member of CPI(ML) politburo who had shared Gorakh Pandey’s poem “Unko phaansi de do” in 2019.

Hegde had re-tweeted the post with the caption “Hang Him”, an English translation of the poem’s title.

The second post was a picture of August Landmesser which Hegde was using as his profile header/ cover photo for over a year.

Hegde had in his plea has also sought the court’s direction to the Centre to frame guidelines to ensure that online speech is not arbitrarily censored by social media websites such as the one run by Twitter.

The plea stated that section 79 (2) (c) read with Section 87 (2) (zg) of the Information Technology Act authorize the Central Government to prescribe guidelines to intermediaries.

( with inputs from Central News Agencies)

Case Title: Sanjay R Hegde vs Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and ors