Delhi HC reserves judgment in Raghav Chadha retweet matter

The Delhi High Court on Thursday reserved its judgment on AAP leader Raghav Chadha’s plea challenging his impleadment in the Arun Jaitley defamation case on the ground that a retweet cannot form the basis for criminal prosecution..After arguing for 3 hours each on two consecutive days, Senior Advocates Siddharth Luthra (for Jaitley) and Anand Grover (for Chadha) concluded on the third day before the Single Judge Bench of Justice Sangita Dhingra Sehgal..On day 2 of the hearing, Luthra had stated that there are four elements to this scenario, namely, public statements (made by the accused including Chadha), press conferences, Facebook posts and tweets/retweets..He said that retweeting was ancillary to other acts and was part of the overall conduct of the accused. He further said that retweet amounts to public dissemination of the comment,.“If you saw a defamatory comment, why did you retweet it? One should have behaved like a responsible citizen.” .Grover reiterated his earlier submissions and stated that the comment is anyway available to the whole world and retweeting did not add anything to it. He further stated that retweeting does not necessarily mean that one likes the tweet..To this the judge quipped,.“Then what was the purpose of retweeting? Passing time?”.Grover replied in the affirmative and said that a lot of people tweet and retweet only to pass time..Grover, to establish dependence of the retweet on the original tweet, argued that once the original tweet is deleted, the retweet also gets deleted. Therefore, control is always with the originator of the tweet..The Court is likely to pronounce the judgment on Monday, September 25.