Madras High Court grants anticipatory bail to BJP's Prashant Umrao; says he should be responsible as a lawyer, verify facts before tweeting

The Madras High Court on Tuesday granted anticipatory bail to Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesperson and lawyer Prashant Umrao in a case registered against him by the Tamil Nadu Police for allegedly spreading false information about attacks against Bihari migrant workers in the State [Prashant Kumar Umrao v. The Inspector of Police]..While doing so, Justice GK Ilanthiraiyan directed Umrao to file an affidavit before the concerned jurisdictional magistrate undertaking that "he will not tweet or forward any messages to promote enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language etc," .The Court also directed him to report to the local police station twice a day for the next 15 days, and after that, as and when required for interrogation. He was also directed to execute a bond of ₹1 lakh and two solvent sureties of the like amount.Justice Ilanthiraiyan said that considering that Umrao was an advocate and member of a national political party, he should have thought about the consequences of his actions..As per the FIR, on February 23 this year, Umrao allegedly tweeted that fifteen people from Bihar had been "hanged in a room in Tamil Nadu for speaking Hindi" and that 12 of them had "sadly died." "After that, (Bihar Deputy Chief Minister) Tejaswi Yadav shamelessly celebrated birthday party with Stalin in Tamil Nadu," the tweet alleged.The police booked Umrao for the tweet and the FIR was registered under Sections 153, 153A, 504 and 505 of the Indian Penal Code..In his plea for anticipatory bail, Umrao denied posting the alleged tweet. He said that a false complaint was made against him because of a political vendetta. He also claimed before the Court that the tweets were originally exhibited on private news channels, and that he had simply retweeted the same. However, on knowing that the news was not confirmed, he had deleted the tweets. .The State government opposed Umrao's plea and argued that his tweets had been intentional and were meant to incite violence and enmity. Umrao's tweets created a panic situation among the Hindi-speaking people in Tamil Nadu and Tamil-speaking people in North India, the State had said. It had also told the Court that Umrao's custodial interrogation was required to check if there existed a larger conspiracy behind the tweets..In his order passed on Tuesday, Justice Ilanthiraiyan said that "fortunately, no untoward incident or group clashes between the community of the two States happened due to the alleged Twitter forwarded by the petitioner as per the news published in the news channel." The Court said it hoped that Umrao being an advocate, will co-operate with the police in its probe. "It is a sorry state of affairs that the petitioner being an advocate, and is actively involved in a national wide political party, he must have some responsibility over the society. Before tweeting or forwarding the Twitter messages, he must think about the consequences of the said messages and the genuineness of the said messages," the High Court said.