Mere withdrawal of Facebook post is no reason to discharge accused in UAPA offence: Madras High Court

The Madras High Court recently refused to discharge a specially-abled lawyer from Madurai who was booked by the National Investigating Agency (NIA) for sharing a Facebook post two years ago that allegedly promoted the ideology of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), a banned organisation. [Mohan v. Union of India].A Bench of Justices PN Prakash and RMT Teekaa Raman said that though the petitioner, Mohan Ramasamy, had deleted the said post from Facebook three days after sharing it, merely deleting it was not adequate reason for discharge."Just because it was withdrawn subsequently, cannot by itself, a reason to discharge the accused from prosecution...The allegations against the accused is uploading a call to follow the footsteps of Naxalbari. This overt act is sufficient to frame charges under UAPA," the Court said..The Court was hearing an appeal by Ramaswamy against a special court order that had rejected his discharge application in June this year. Ramasamy argued that mere uploading of messages on social media should not be a ground for invoking terrorism charges under the UAPA or Sedition charges under Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).He argued that the UAPA defined a terrorist act as something that caused physical violence, and that expressing an opinion or sharing a social media post cannot count as an act of physical violence. He added that he had deleted his post within three days of sharing it on Facebook in September 2020, and hence, it was pointless to prosecute him now..The NIA, however, opposed the plea, stating that Ramaswamy and two other persons accused in the case had uploaded the objectionable message on social media with multiple hashtags in order to instigate as many people as possible, asking them to follow the path shown by an armed struggle, and therefore, the prosecution must continue.The message circulated by the accused in Tamil could be loosely translated as: "The independence obtained on August 15, 1947 was a farce because the country is yet to get rid of feudalism, imperialism, and exploitation of the poor. In order to gain real independence, let us mobilise in the path of war shown by Naxalbari.".The High Court agreed with the NIA's submission and said that the Supreme Court had held in previous judgments that one could be booked under UAPA on mere suspicion."The appellant is being prosecuted under Sections 13 (1)(b), 38 & 39 of UAP Act for being part of a banned terrorist outfit viz., CPI (Maoist) and promoting its ideologies. It is trite that a strong suspicion is enough to frame charges. Therefore, we find no merits in the present Criminal Appeal and the same deserves only to be dismissed," the Bench held..Advocate R Sankarasubbu appeared for Ramasamy. Special Public Prosecutor R Karthikeyan appeared for the NIA..[Read judgment]