Former television journalist and current AAP leader Ashutosh is often mocked for his spellings and grammatical mistakes while composing tweets in English (though he has made similar mistakes in some Hindi tweets too), but this has failed to save him in a court of law.
A Delhi court has observed that Ashutosh (and his advocate) does not even have a “slight discomfiture in English” while rejecting his application for re-recording senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley’s statement in Hindi, presumably because English is not easy to understand for Ashutosh.
Ashutosh had sought to re-record Jaitley’s statements in Hindi in the defamation case filed by the BJP leader against various AAP leaders who had called him guilty of corruption in the DDCA case. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal is also one of the accused.
While rejecting Ashutosh’s application for having Jaitley’s statement in Hindi, the court noted that the application was “an attempt to derail the proceedings of the case and waste precious time of the court”.
“The applicant (Ashutosh) is author of well-known book in English titled as ‘Anna: 13 Days That Awakened India’ and he can be seen giving interviews in English day in and day out on English News Channels and elsewhere,” the court said, rejecting the possibility that Ashutosh was weak in English.
The application to re-record Jaitley’s statement in Hindi itself was written in English, the court further noted. The court then dismissed the application and imposed a fine of 10,000 rupees on Ashutosh for wasting court’s precious time.
Ashutosh is supposed to deposit this amount with ‘Army Welfare Fund Battle Causalities’ on court’s directions.
This is not the first time when AAP leaders have found themselves in embarrassing positions in this case filed by Arun Jaitley. Earlier, Arvind Kejriwal was seen contradicting his own lawyer Ram Jethmalani, after which Jethmalani quit the case, calling Kejriwal a ‘liar’.
Another AAP leader named Raghav Chadha had tried to show himself innocent by claiming that he had not made any defamatory charges against Arun Jaitley but only re-tweeted some tweets by Kejriwal against Jaitley. Court had rejected his plea as being “devoid of any merit”.
Now Ashutosh has put himself in an embarrassing position by virtually claiming to be weak at English but being told by the court not to act over-smart.
On a lighter note, now that a court has given a “clean chit” to Ashutosh by saying that his English was good, will Twitter users stop trolling him for his mistakes in tweets? Or was it all a calculated move by Ashutosh to make spelling and grammatical mistakes in his tweets, so that later he could claim to be weak in English in a court of law? Only Trolls know the answer.
