A Zee News anchor, facing arrests in the broadcast of Rahul Gandhi’s doctored video, has approached the Supreme Court seeking an urgent hearing in the matter. Much to the comfort of anchor Rahul Ranjan, the top court has agreed to hear his case on Friday (tomorrow).
A Supreme Court Bench comprising Chief Justice of India NV Ramana and Justices Krishna Murari and Hima Kohli will hear his plea on Friday, reported news agency PTI.
Ranjan’s lawyer, Siddhartha Dave, had made the plea to CJI Ramana on behalf of the anchor. Dave had argued how the Supreme Court had provided him protection from arrests in the matter.
On 8 July, a Supreme Court Bench of Justices Indira Banerjee and J K Maheshwari had granted relief to Ranjan and directed the police to not arrest the anchor in the doctored video case.
This was after a team from the Chhattisgarh Police had arrived in Ghaziabad to arrest Ranjan. A desperate Ranjan had tweeted tagging UP Police and Chief Minister Yogi Aditynath to bail him out of the misery. This had prompted the Ghaziabad Police to stop Ranjan’s arrest by the Chhattisgarh Police. Instead, Ranjan was arrested by the UP Police briefly before being released on bail.
Ranjan, in his programme DNA, had wrongly linked Rahul Gandhi’s remarks for SFI protesters in Kerala to the beheading of a Hindu tailor in Udaipur. In reality, Gandhi was reacting to the attack on his office in Wayanad in Kerala by SFI activists, but Ranjan had said that the Congress leader was commenting about Kanhaiya Lal’s killers. Faced with multiple FIRs, Zee News had issued two public apologies on LIVE TV.
