New Delhi: The Delhi High Court on Tuesday vacated its directive to journalist Abhishek Baxi to take down a social media post wherein he appeared to attack fellow journalist Rohan Dua for the questions that Dua had posed to Olympic medallist Manu Bhaker.
“You are one of the most attractive females – beautiful females – in India’s history of Olympics,” Baxi’s August 16 post quoted Dua as having said in his interview with Bhaker for The New Indian.
Baxi said on X that he had been “served an injunction order [on September 4] by lawyers of Rohan Dua for my tweet about his questions to ace shooter Manu Bhaker”, Scroll.in reported.
Dua had asked Baxi to remove the allegedly defamatory post, claiming he was offended by the subsequent "false" and "harmful" accusations. Due to Baxi's remark, Dua said that users of the social media site had tagged him as "creepy" and "unprofessional."
However, the court on Tuesday noted: “There is nothing defamatory in this. This is [Baxi’s] opinion which he is entitled to.”
The bench further stated that people had the right to believe Dua had no right to interview Bhaker in a particular manner.
“It cannot be countenanced that a social media post which states two admitted facts as per [Dua’s petition] along with an unedited and non-manipulated embedded video, could amount to defamation warranting immediate deletion from the social media platform,” the court said.
It added: “The same would cast a chilling effect on free speech, where mere reproduction of facts to facilitate public discourse would suffer the consequences of permanent deletion.”