NEW DELHI: Editor of Tamil weekly ‘Thuglak’ and RSS ideologue Swaminathan Gurumurthy submitted before the Delhi High Court on Thursday that he will not file a second affidavit tendering an ‘unconditional apology’ for his tweet in a 2018 contempt case against a judge.
The contempt petition was moved by the Delhi High Court Bar Association (DHCBA) after Gurumurthy, in one of his tweets, questioned whether Justice S Muralidhar — a former Delhi High Court judge and serving Chief Justice of Orissa High Court — was junior to Senior Advocate P Chidambaram.
His tweet was following a division bench led by Justice Muralidhar’s decision to award temporary protection to Karti Chidambaram in the INX Media case. Before the division bench of Justice Siddharth Mridul and Justice Talwant Singh, Gurumurthy’s counsel Senior Advocate Mahesh Jethmalani submitted that the tweet was deleted after he came to know about the factual error and the matter was clarified.
An affidavit tendering apology has already been filed in the case in 2018, the court was informed. “I am sorry, but this is not an apology. File a two-line apology and put a quietus to this. Say it on affidavit and the matter ends,” Justice Talwant Singh remarked. The senior counsel, however, reiterated his position, saying that the bench may proceed to hear the case on merits.
Accordingly, the matter was posted for hearing “on merits” by the bench. A further hearing will be held on July 6. In October 2019, the high court had dropped the contempt proceedings against Gurumurthy in another case for having re-tweeted an article against Justice S Muralidhar.
On April 10, the court had discharged filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri after he tendered an unconditional apology and expressed his remorse for the alleged remarks against Justice S Muralidhar. A suo motu contempt petition was filed against the filmmaker following his tweet against the judge, who had in his order, quashed rights activist Gautam Navlakha’s house arrest and transit remand in the Bhima Koregaon case in 2018.