Delhi HC orders man to apologise to Md. Zubair for offensive comment

Delhi High Court directs man to apologize to Alt News co-founder for offensive tweet on social media.

The Delhi High Court on Thursday (August 22, 2024) directed a man named Jagdish Singh to apologise to Alt News co-founder Mohammad Zubair for his “offensive” comment against him on social media platform X (formerly Twitter).

The court asked Mr. Singh to publish his apology on his handle on X in one week while “giving context to the offensive tweet” and retain the post for two months. Mr. Singh had on X posted “Once a jihadi is always jihadi” against Mr. Zubair in April 2020.

The court, which was dealing with Mr. Zubair’s petition to quash an FIR registered against him following his online spat with the social media user, noted that Mr. Singh has expressed regret before the city police for calling him “offensive communal names” and claimed that there was no malice to hurt or offend Mr. Zubair.

“He has chosen unfortunate words. Let him put it [apology] out on his X (Twitter) handle...We want people to be temperate on social media and if you get carried away, the first thing you have to do is at least apologise,” Justice Anup Jairam Bhambhani said.

“If he has expressed regret and said ‘niyat nahi thi’, let him atone for that,” the judge added.

The court’s direction came on Mr. Zubair’s 2020 plea seeking to quash an FIR registered against him in Delhi. The FIR centred around a post Mr. Zubair shared on August 6, 2020, on X, where he called out Mr. Singh, who he alleged is a habitual social media troll for being an abusive person on social media.

In the post, Mr. Zubair shared an image of Mr. Singh standing with a minor girl, whose face was pixelated, with the comment: “Hello Jagdish Singh, Does your cute granddaughter know about your part-time job of abusing people on social media?”