2007 hate speech case against Yogi Adityanath: HC reserves order on petition challenging lower court’s decision

Last November, a court in Prayagraj dismissed a petition filed by Parvez Parwaz and Asad Hayat challenging the final report in the hate speech case.

“It is an old case in which (prosecution) sanction was refused. The final report was filed earlier. Parwaz had filed a protest petition against it in a lower court. The protest petition was dismissed by the lower court in November 2022. The matter was also heard by the Supreme Court. Now, they have filed a petition challenging the November 2022 order. The original case of 2007 was against (present) CM Yogi Adityanath. However, they (petitioners) have not made the CM a party (in the case). Instead, they have made the state government a party in the latest petition under the CrPC section 482,” Additional Advocate General Manish Goyal said. “On Tuesday, the lawyers of the petitioners made arguments made in the past too, saying a fair probe was not done in the case,” Goyal said.

Senior advocate SFA Naqvi, who represented the two petitioners in the High Court, said, “The final report in the hate speech case was submitted in 2017. A petition challenging the report was dismissed by the lower court. We have challenged the lower court’s order in the High Court.”

In January 27, 2007, a Hindu youth was killed in a clash between two groups during a Muharram procession in Gorakhpur. Parwaz, a local journalist and 0activist, filed a case on September 26, 2008, claiming that Adityanath, then the local BJP MP, had delivered speeches seeking “revenge” for the death of the Hindu youth, and he had videos of the same.

On July 10, 2015, police sought the prosecution nod from the state government, then led by Samajwadi Party, against Adityanath and former MLC YD Singh, MLA Radha Mohan Das Agarwal, former BJP mayor Anju Chaudhary and former minister Shiv Pratap Shukla.

Two months after Adityanath became chief minister in 2017, the state government told the High Court that it had refused sanction for prosecuting him and others booked in the case.

In its affidavit, the government said the forensic report found that the videos of the speeches were not original and had been “edited and tampered (with)”, and voice samples were not directly taken from Adityanath but from his other speech. In February 2018, the High Court dismissed Parwaz’s plea, finding no procedural error either in the probe or the refusal of sanction. Parwaz then moved the Supreme Court, contending whether as CM, Adityanath could have participated in the process of denying prosecution sanction.

Meanwhile, in July 2020, a Gorakhpur court sentenced Parwaz to life imprisonment in a 2018 gangrape case.