Bombay High Court tells police not to file chargesheet against ex-editor
Mumbai: The Bombay high court on Monday directed the police to not file a chargesheet against Shirin Dalvi, former editor of Awadhnama newspaper, over the daily republishing a controversial caricature of Prophet Mohammed from French weekly Charlie Hebdo, till final hearing of her petition gets over.
The court, while directing the police, said, “These days people are hyper-sensitive about such matters.”
On January 16, 2015, Awadhnama newspaper in its edition had carried the cover page of the January 14, 2015 issue of Charlie Hebdo, which contained Prophet Mohammed’s caricature. After that Ms Dalvi had issued an apology on the next day’s edition of the newspaper but a series of complaints were registered against her in Mumbai, Thane and Malegaon region. She was arrested in Mumbra and later released on bail.
On February 2015, Ms Dalvi had filed a petition in the Bombay high court and sought quashing of the cases against her and clubbing together all cases filed against her.
She also prayed for a direction to prevent the government and the police from taking coercive action against her, including arrest.
A division bench of Justices V.M. Kanade and Nutan Sardessai on Monday admitted the petition filed by Ms Dalvi, challenging the complaints lodged against her at various places in the state for allegedly spreading malicious content and hurting religious sentiments. In her petition, she requested the court to quash all the FIRs against her.
The editor also pleaded that she was the only woman editor of an Urdu daily newspaper in India and due to the events following the publication of the Prophet’s cartoon, she is facing threats of physical attacks. Several FIRs have been filed against her and she also had to abandon her home.
Ms Dalvi further said her children had to discontinue their education and were compelled to go incognito along with their mother out of fear of physical harm.
Ms Dalvi stated in her petition that her act did not violate Section 295 of IPC, which deals with outraging religious feelings of people with deliberate and malicious intent.
