The Karnataka Excessive Courtroom has quashed a prison case booked beneath the Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act in opposition to seven college students of a neighborhood school over a skit with jokes on Dalits, indicating that the play was satirical in nature and never meant to humiliate members of the SC/ST neighborhood in public.
“It’s pertinent to notice that the impugned FIR has not been lodged by an individual who’s a member of the SC/ST neighborhood and there’s no materials to point that the petitioners had any particular intention to insult or intimidate with an intent to humiliate a member of the SC/ST neighborhood in anywhere inside public view,” the excessive court docket stated in a current order on the 2023 case.
The court docket stated the skit carried out by the scholars throughout a school competition was “within the nature of satire/leisure, which is constitutionally protected beneath Article 19 of the Structure of India, which ensures freedom of speech and expression,” and that the case doesn’t have the substances to draw the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.
A bench of Justice S R Krishna Kumar cited a number of Supreme Courtroom rulings to conclude that quashing the case was mandatory since “continuation of the impugned proceedings in opposition to the petitioners would quantity to abuse of means of regulation….”
In February 2023, the excessive court docket had stayed investigations within the case in opposition to seven college students of Jain College in Bengaluru over a skit they staged at a school competition.
Aside from the seven college students aged 20 to 21, Neelkant Borkar, director of the Centre for Administration Research, Praveen Thokdar, an assistant professor of commerce at Jain College, had been additionally booked within the case.
The case pertains to a police criticism filed by an assistant director of the Social Welfare Division on February 10, 2023, with the Siddapura police in south Bengaluru.
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The scholars, who had been half of a faculty theatre group known as the The Delroys Boys, carried out a Mad-ads skit on the theme of reservation at a public occasion. A video of the skit went viral on social media, and sure parts of it had been considered as derogatory of their references to Dr B R Ambedkar and Dalits.
The assistant director of the Social Welfare Division, Madhusudhan Okay N, who was alerted concerning the video of the skit, instructed the police that the case attracts the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act for the reason that skit was staged in public and shared on social media.
The scholars had been additionally charged beneath Indian Penal Code sections 153A for selling enmity between communities, 149 for illegal meeting and 295A for outraging non secular emotions.
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