No Sou Moto Contempt Proceedings Against Rajdeep Sardesai Clarifies Supreme Court

No Sou Moto Contempt proceedings against Rajdeep Sardesai

Call it inadvertence or a technical glitch, the Supreme Court's website made way for some news on Tuesday evening. The case status section on SC's website showed that a sou moto contempt case has been registered against Senior Journalist Rajdeep Sardesai. However, a clarification was issued as soon as the news broke out. It turns out that no contempt proceedings have been initiated against Mr Sardesai and that the case status reflected on SC's website was unintentional. The Supreme Court's case section was down on Tuesday evening while the inadvertent error was been rectified.

Background of the contempt case against Mr Sardesai

Mr Sardesai had made some remarks on Twitter expressing his displeasure over Supreme Court's decision in Prashant Bhushan's contempt case. One Aastha Khurana lodged a complaint to initiate contempt proceedings stating that the tweets made by Sardesai are against the Judiciary. However, AG KK Venugopal did not find the tweets derogatory and refused to give consent to initiate criminal contempt proceedings.

Trifling remarks and mere passing of criticism though perhaps distasteful are unlikely to tarnish the image of the institution", Mr Venugopal had earlier said.

However, Ms Khurana had filed a petition directly with the Supreme Court subsequent to AG K.K. Venugopal declining his consent in the matter.