After the contempt of court charges pressed on Kunal Kamra on Thursday, the standup comedian said through a post today on Twitter that he doesn’t “intend to retract his tweets or apologize” for the comments as those were his “views” regarding SC’s decision of granting interim bail to journalist Goswami on Wednesday.
No lawyers, No apology, No fine, No waste of space 🙏🙏🙏 pic.twitter.com/B1U7dkVB1W
— Kunal Kamra (@kunalkamra88) November 13, 2020
The comic had tweeted a series of remarks on the top court’s order in the Arnab Goswami case only a week after he had been arrested while thousands of people remain locked up for ages waiting for their hearing dates.
Posting a message intended for the judges of Supreme Court and Attorney Venugopal, who had agreed to the eight people’s plea for suing Mr. Kamra, he captioned it saying, “No lawyers, no apology, no fine, no waste of space.”
The underlined part of the message included the comedian’s stance regarding the time being allotted to him for the contempt petition rather than the court providing the same for “other matters and parties who haven’t been as lucky and privileged” like him ” to jump the queue, referring to hearing dates that sometimes are declared after an accused dies in the jail.
The attorney on Thursday had said that the comedian “crossed the line” between humor and contempt, permitting the law student, advocates, and others who approached him to file criminal contempt of court cases. “…attacking the SC unjustifiable and brazenly will lead to punishment,” Venugopal had said in his response to one of the lawyer’s emails seeking permission to sue Mr. Kamra.
The attorney had mentioned the “gross insinuation” made against the top court as he believed that people go about condemning the court while calling it “freedom of speech”.
Lawyer Chandni, a law student Shirang Katneshwar and another advocate had emailed Mr. Venugopal to bring Mr. Kamra’s whirlwind of tweets to the attorney’s attention. In one of the letters, the petitioner said the comedian had “insulted the court through his mediocrity”.
Mr. Kamra has been criticizing the Supreme Court since it passed orders granting the interim bail of the loud journalist, Arnab Goswami, just a week following his arrest by the Maharashtra police in the Anvay Naik suicide case of 2018. The architect had left a suicide note in which he blamed Goswami and two other people for dragging him and his mother to commit suicide as they did not pay his dues, amounting to crores of rupees.
The Maharashtra police had reopened the case at the Naik family’s request.
The journalist reached the SC after the Bombay High Court dismissed his bail plea. To this, the top court said that the High Court doesn’t have permission to grant bails in matters of personal liberty.
A vacation bench of two judges had given the bail order for Goswami while telling the Maharashtra government to “ignore his taunts”, referring to the journalist’s ill choice of words and rather harsh and overloud criticism. They asked as to if the top court won’t protect the liberty of citizens then who will? Kunal Kamra continued to be in the limelight after he asked Goswami a series of questions, in the journalist’s way of questioning, in an IndiGo flight while Goswami remained tight-lipped. Following this, many airlines had banned the comedian from boarding.
Mr. Kamra is being trolled for his comments at the Supreme Court on social media.
