New Delhi: A Delhi court has issued fresh summons to YouTuber Dhruv Rathee in an eight-year-old criminal defamation case filed by Vikas Pandey over a video titled “BJP IT Cell Part 2”, with the social media influencer now having been served at his residence in Gurugram.
The case, pending before the Saket Court, relates to allegations that the video was defamatory. The video was also retweeted by Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal in 2018, who later admitted before the Supreme Court that he had made a mistake by retweeting it.
In its order, the court acknowledged the prolonged attempts to serve summons on Rathee, who ordinarily resides in Austria, and permitted fresh summons to be served through dasti service, while allowing the complainant to accompany the process server. Rathee has now been physically served with the summons at his Gurugram residence. The matter is scheduled to be heard next October 17.
The proceedings against Rathee had remained pending amid unsuccessful attempts to serve him with the summons since 2019, with the complainant claiming that his continued absence from India had stalled the case.
The matter had previously reached the Supreme Court in connection with a retweet of the same video by Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) national convenor Arvind Kejriwal.
In February 2024, Kejriwal had told the apex court that he had made a mistake by retweeting the video.
A bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna (later CJI and now retired) and Dipankar Datta had granted a stay on the proceedings pending before the trial court while hearing his plea challenging the Delhi High Court’s refusal to quash the summons issued against him.
Earlier, the Delhi High Court had upheld the summoning order, observing that retweeting defamatory content could attract the offence of defamation under Section 499 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
Pandey, founder of the social media page ‘I Support Narendra Modi’, had alleged that the retweet tarnished his reputation.
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