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Synopsis

A Supreme Court bench of Justice Indira Banerjee and J.K.Maheshwari today informed that Zee News anchor Rohit Ranjan’s plea has not been assigned to a bench as yet.

Senior Advocate Sidharth Luthra, mentioned the plea yesterday and sought an urgent listing. Despite the court permitting the case to be listed on July 7, i.e. today it did not come up for hearing.

Rohit Ranjan, news anchor and Executive Assistant Producer of Zee News,  filed a writ petition under Article 32 before the Supreme Court. The plea sought for quashing of FIRs, clubbing of the multiple FIRs filed against him, and for protection against coercive measures. 

According to the plea, multiple FIRs and complaints against him have been filed for telecasting a program namely “DNA” on Zee News on July 1, 2022. The contents of the program pertained to attacks by certain miscreants on the party office of a political party in Kerala.

It has been stated that Zee News received a video from a third-party agency namely ANI and the video was handled by Bikash Kumar Jha, who was working as a Trainee Producer, and Narinder Singh. According to the plea, relying upon the video prepared by the aforementioned individuals, a script was prepared for the Channel’s 9 pm show. It has been stated that the contents of the show contained certain factual inaccuracies.

According to the plea, upon realising the unintentional error, Zee News immediately retracted the news segment, apologised on-air and deleted all social media posts pertaining the news segment.

Ranjan too apologised for the errors committed in the said show and expressed utmost regret on his prime time show, DNA as well on his Twitter Handle. However, subsequently, multiple FIRs/ Complaints have been filed against him under various provisions of law for the same incident, even though the error was unintentional and was almost immediately set right by Ranjan and Zee News, the plea states.

It has been contended that multiple FIRs arising out of the same cause of action are not permissible under law. Furthermore, the issue was covered under the provisions of Section 16 and 17 of the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act, 1995 and Programming Rules against the broadcaster.  According to the plea, when there is special law dealing with the issues in question, there is no question to invoke the criminal statute or registration of FIRs.

Furthermore, the plea notes that Ranjan is being hounded by police from several states for an act that was neither intentional nor motivated and for which an unconditional apology has already been tendered.

Siddharth Luthra, Sr. Adv, is being briefed by Karanjawala and Co. led by Ruby Singh Ahuja-Sr. Partner and Samarjit Pattnaik-Partner along with their respective teams comprising  Vikas Gogne, Vishal Gehrana, Irfan Muzamil, Satyam Chaturvedi, Ms. Kritika Sachdeva and Varun Khanna, Advocates.

The matter is likely to be listed before the court on, July 08, 2022.

Case title: Rohit Ranjan Vs Union of India