Republic TV Editor-in-Chief, Arnab Goswami on Tuesday, May 6, 2020, moved the Supreme Court again seeking quashing of a fresh FIR registered against him for allegedly communalising an incident of migrant workers getting collected at Bandra railway station in Mumbai last month in violation of COVID19 lockdown.
Mumbai police registered another FIR against the Republic TV Editor. The new FIR has been registered on his remarks over the migrant labour protest in Bandra on April 14, therefore this does not come under the ambit of Supreme Court order that had said that no fresh FIR can be filed Against Goswami for his comments on Sonia Gandhi’s silence in Palghar lynching case.
According to newspaper reports, the complaint was lodged against Goswami by Raza Educational Welfare Society Secretary Irfan Abubakar Shaikh, the FIR accused Goswami of disturbing communal harmony through his Hindi show on Republic Bharat by allegedly communalising the April 14 incident.
According to a report by Hindustan Times, the new FIR was registered on Sunday at Pydhonie police station on the complaint of Irfan Abubakar Shaikh, secretary of Raza Educational Welfare Society and a resident of Null Bazar in South Mumbai. The complaint said that Arnab Goswami had tried to create hatred against the Muslim community by linking the Bandra protests with a mosque near the protest site even though there was no such link.
The newspaper reports mentioned that Shaikh said that on April, in a show on Republic Bharat anchored by Arnab Goswami, footage of the Bandra protest by migrants near Bandra railway station was used. The complaint said that protestors had only gathered at an open space near the mosque, but there was no link between the mosque and the protests. But “Arnab purposely highlighted the mosque to create communal disturbance in the city,” the complainant alleged. Terming the incident a conspiracy, he had described migrant workers as “actors” planted by people with vested interests.
Goswami is already facing probe in another case registered against him at Nagpur and transferred to Mumbai in connection with his alleged remarks against Congress president Sonia Gandhi during his shows on Republic TV on mob-lynching of two Hindu saints in Palghar, Maharashtra.
The Supreme Court had on April 24 stayed all coercive action against Goswami for three weeks in connection with multiple FIRs but allowed probe into the Nagpur FIR.
