The Supreme Court has dismissed a petition seeking review of its April decision, which held that no cognisable offence had been made out against Bharatiya Janata Party leaders Anurag Thakur and Parvesh Verma for alleged acts of hate speech in 2020, reported Bar and Bench on Monday.
At a rally in January 2020, Thakur was heard shouting “desh ke gaddaron ko” and the crowd responded with “goli maaro saalon ko”. The slogan meant “shoot the traitors”, with an expletive used for “traitors” being a reference to those protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act.
In his speech, Verma had told an audience that the “lakhs of protestors” who had gathered at Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh would enter their homes to “rape their sisters and daughters and kill them”.
The speeches were made ahead of the Assembly elections in Delhi in 2020. Soon after, riots had broken out in North East Delhi in February that year, in which 53 persons died and hundreds were injured. The majority of victims were Muslim.
The April 29 decision by the Supreme Court came on a petition filed by Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Brinda Karat against a Delhi High Court order that upheld a trial court’s refusal to direct the registration of a case against the BJP leaders.
A bench of Justices Vikram Nath and…