Maharashtra police, working at the behest of Uddhav Thackeray government has been using every trick up its sleeves to harass and break the morale of Republic TV editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami. After recent efforts to slander his image by leaking his private Whatsapp chats backfired, Mumbai police has now filed a criminal defamation complaint against the journalist, over some claims made by him during a debate revolving around Sushant Singh Rajput death case in August 2020.
Almost 8 months after, when realisation suddenly hit upon DCP Abhishek Trimukhe, he filed a criminal defamation complaint against Republic TV Editor-in-Chief Arnab Goswami, his wife and the owner of the channel ARG Outlier for alleged defamatory statements made against him by Goswami under Indian Penal Code (IPC) sections 499, 500 (defamation) and 501 (printing or engraving matter known to be defamatory).
“The said defamatory attacks have been made with a singular view of assassinating his (DCP Trimukhe’s) official character and thereby…maliciously and deliberately causing undue humiliation of the Mumbai Police Department,” the complaint said.
Despite not being on any social media platform, complaint accuses Arnab Goswami of ‘Tweeting’ contents of telecast
As per the complaint, Arnab Goswami made “grossly false”, “malicious” and defamatory statements during the coverage of actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s death by suicide last year. It further claimed that these defamatory statements were telecast on the channel Republic Bharat during a discussion about phone records of actor Rhea Chakraborty on August 7, 2020.
In the complaint, the DCP has accused Arnab Goswami of misrepresenting him and defaming his image in a Tweet. “There were some tweets which misrepresented Trimukhe. He had written about it to the Maharashtra government. The state home department gave its sanction (to file a complaint),” news agency PTI quoted a senior police official as saying.
The complaint further stated Goswami also tweeted the contents of the telecast. He alleged that Goswami runs the Twitter handle @arnab5222 with nearly 2 lakh followers, and has reiterated and recirculated the defamatory telecast to an even larger audience, through Twitter. Although a Twitter account with this name exists, it only has 18 followers, and the account has not posted anything that links it to Arnab Goswami.
The interesting part here is that Arnab Goswami is not present on the microblogging site nor on any other social media platform. Confirming the same, Arnab Goswami’s lawyers said that the tweets referred to in the complaint filed by DCP Abhishek Trimukhe were from a fake Twitter account.
From his name being dragged in a false TRP scam or accusing him of “terrorising” police in a debate to being arrested by the Maharashtra police in a years-old abetment to suicide case that had been closed smacks of vendetta.
