New Delhi: The Delhi High Court Wednesday observed that the court is not a platform to propagate any religion and asked lawyers to desist from taking names of any religion.
The court made the point clear while hearing a batch of pleas by several account holders challenging their suspension and deletion by the social media platforms.
“Let one thing be very clear. This (court) platform is not for propagating any religion. This is only to deal with the law. You please desist from using words like Hindu,…” the judge said when a counsel for one of the petitioners started arguing his case and mentioned the name of ‘Hindu’ religion.
The court asked the counsel for all the parties to complete their pleading and file written submissions and listed the matter for further hearing on April 28.
Twitter account holder Wokeflix, whose account was earlier suspended and then deleted by the micro-blogging platform on the allegation of promoting hate speech, has told the high court that Twitter is following blatant double standards where Hindu sentiments are allowed to be ridden roughshod over and sentiments of other communities are treated with kid gloves.
In its written submissions, Wokeflix alleged that the micro-blogging site was “aiding and abetting in the normalisation of genocidal tyrants like Aurangzeb”.
“Respondent no.2 (Twitter) seems to have a policy whereby Hindu sentiments are allowed to be ridden roughshod over whereas sentiments of other communities are treated with kid gloves,” it submitted.
“The question that we need to ask ourselves in a secular country wherein 80 per cent of the population is Hindu is whether the respondent no. 2 would dare to allow posts extolling the likes of Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, or Reinhard Heydrich by neo Nazi extremists. If the answer is in the negative then we must ask ourselves as to why similar courtesy cannot be extended to Hindus in this country.
“The fact that Twitter is allowing what can only be termed as Hate Speech against Hindus is symptomatic of the anti-Hindu bias of some of its executives in India,” the written submissions filed through an authorised representative of Wokeflix stated.
Another petitioner and senior advocate Sanjay Hegde approached the high court in 2019 seeking directions to the Centre to lay down guidelines under the Information Technology (IT) Act to ensure that censorship on social media is carried out in accordance with the Constitution.
He had filed the plea as his account on Twitter was permanently suspended by the social media platform on November 5, 2019, allegedly in connection with two re-tweets by him, and sought restoration of his Twitter account.
In the written submissions, he said Twitter discharges a public function of “high public interest” which makes it amenable to the jurisdiction of the high court, and added that a purely private contract can be enforced by a mandamus if it is found that the body discharges public function.
The submission was made in pursuance of Twitter’s stand that it does not impart public function and “serving the ends of freedom of speech and expression” was only incidental to its contractual relationship with the users.
In a note submitted to the high court in 2021 in connection with the suspension of the senior advocate’s account, the microblogging site had said that “services on the Twitter platform is a contractual relationship” and “in its commercial venture, that it incidentally also serves the ends of freedom of speech and expression would not convert the nature of the activity”.
Twitter has responded by claiming that Hegde’s petition was not maintainable.
The US-based firm stated that its services are covered by the Information Technology Act which has a grievance redressal mechanism and that Hegde’s recourse was to file a complaint on the portal under the Act.
According to Hegde’s petition, the first of the two posts pertained to a tweet by Kavita Krishnan, secretary of the All India Progressive Women’s Association (AIPWA) and member of the politburo of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (CPI-ML), who had posted Gorakh Pandey’s poem ‘Unko phaansi de do’ on her Twitter profile.
Hegde had re-tweeted and shared Krishnan’s post with the caption ‘Hang Him’, an English translation of the poem’s title, the petition said.
The second post was a picture of August Landmesser which Hegde was using as his profile header/cover photo for over a year, it said.
It said, “The photograph in question was taken on June 13, 1936, and shows a large gathering of workers at the Blohm Voss shipyard in Hamburg. Almost everyone in the image has raised his arm in the Nazi salute. The only exception is Landmesser, who stands toward the back of the crowd, with his arms crossed over his chest.”
PTI