The Supreme Court has dismissed a petition seeking review of its April decision, which held that no cognisable offence had been made out against Bharatiya Janata Party leaders Anurag Thakur and Parvesh Verma for alleged acts of hate speech in 2020, reported Bar and Bench on Monday.

At a rally in January 2020, Thakur was heard shouting “desh ke gaddaron ko” and the crowd responded with “goli maaro saalon ko”. The slogan meant “shoot the traitors”, with an expletive used for “traitors” being a reference to those protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act.

In his speech, Verma had told an audience that the “lakhs of protestors” who had gathered at Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh would enter their homes to “rape their sisters and daughters and kill them”.

The speeches were made ahead of the Assembly elections in Delhi in 2020. Soon after, riots had broken out in North East Delhi in February that year, in which 53 persons died and hundreds were injured. The majority of victims were Muslim.

The April 29 decision by the Supreme Court came on a petition filed by Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Brinda Karat against a Delhi High Court order that upheld a trial court’s refusal to direct the registration of a case against the BJP leaders.

A bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta had said that it did not find any grounds to interfere with the High Court order on merits.

Karat then filed the review petition and sought an open court hearing of it. The request was earlier dismissed by Nath and Mehta.

On July 29, they dismissed the review petition itself, reported Bar and Bench.

“We have gone through the review petition as well as the grounds in support thereof,” said the bench. “We do not find any error, much less apparent, in the order impugned, warranting its reconsideration.”

In her petition seeking an FIR against the two BJP leaders, Karat had alleged that the speeches threatened use of force to remove protesters who were agitating at Shaheen Bagh against the Citizenship Amendment Act and to promote enmity towards Muslims by portraying them as invaders who will enter houses to rape and kill.

In June 2022, the High Court had upheld the verdict of the trial court and said that the petitioners had not followed the prescribed mechanism under the Code of Criminal Procedure for seeking the registration of an FIR in such cases.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

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