Madras high court
“…that gentleman’s eminence secured his release within hours and an audience at the secretariat; a common citizen with no access to power, taken at dawn on the same mistaken complaint, would have tasted the lock-up, the remand and the long road of a trial before anyone asked whether the account was even his,” the judge added. It is against that measure that the handling of political speech—this case included—falls to be judged,” the court said. “The measure of a police force is not how it treats the eminent when the press is watching, but how it treats the unknown when nobody is.
CHENNAI: Four days after the Tamil Nadu chief minister C Joseph Vijay met Madras Institute of Development Studies associate professor A Kalaiyarasan who had been wrongfully detained over a fake social media post, the Madras high court on Tuesday asserted that “an apology, however high its source, is not accountability.
Magnanimity towards political speech is not a grace the state may extend or withhold; it is what the Constitution exacts of those who hold power over their critics,” the court said. As to the alleged derogatory speech made by the councillor, the court said, “This state has a platform tradition older than the republic, whose great practitioners proved that Tamil oratory can wound without descending to filth; an elected representative owes the discourse at least that much. Her own party seniors told her as much at the venue, and to her credit she accepted it—publicly, and on oath, before any court asked her to.
The court made the observations while granting anticipatory bail to DMK councillor D Sudha, who apprehended arrest in connection with a criminal case registered for her alleged derogatory remarks against the chief minister. “A govt confident of itself meets criticism with argument, mockery with performance, and abuse— where it truly crosses the line—with the remedy the law of defamation provides. “