HC to hear Brinda Karat's plea on FIR against BJP leaders in alleged hate speech

New Delhi :The Delhi High Court will hear CPI(M) leader Brinda Karat's petition challenging a trial court order which had dismissed her plea seeking registration of FIR against BJP leaders Anurag Thakur and Parvesh Verma over their alleged hate speech during the Delhi riots.

The plea was listed before a single judge bench of Justice Yogesh Khanna who asked both parties to file the set of judgments they would rely on and posted the matters for further hearing on November 2.

In her petition Karata challenged the order passed by the trial court on August 26 dismissing her plea seeking FIR against the two leaders on the grounds that the requisite sanction from the competent authority, the central government, was not obtained.

During the course of brief hearing, advocate Siddharth Aggarwal appearing for Karat informed the court that the lower court kept the matter pending for around nine months and later dismissed the same without even getting into the merits of this case.

CPI(M) leaders Brinda Karat and KM Tewari had filed the complaint before the trial court seeking a direction to the Parliament Street Police Station to register an FIR against Thakur and Verma.

However, the trial court said that the complaint was not sustainable without prior sanction.

"The Petitioners/Complainants in the present case, already aggrieved by the failure of the Police to register an FIR for the commission of cognizable offences amounting to hate speech, have now been relegated by the Ld. ACMM to seek sanction from the State/Centre, a sanction which is a statutory requirement for taking cognizance, not investigation," said the two Left leaders in their petition.

"The Complainant is effectively being asked to step into the shoes of the investigating agency and make a case for prosecution before the Sanctioning Agency. Furthermore, any Application for Sanction by the complainant at this stage would be without the benefit of materials and evidence obtained during investigation," the plea said further.

This report from IANS has been edited