Clubhouse case: Accused granted bail, to undergo mandatory behavioural counselling

Lawyers Akshay Bafna and Gayatri Gokhale appeared for Yashkumar. Bafna said, “Cyber police could not prove that Yash Parashar and Yash Kumar (my client) are one and the same person. We had told the court that fake accounts with photos of my client were used… he is a bright student with a bright future and does not have any prior criminal record.”

“The court pronounced that our client will have to undergo 15 days’ behavioural counselling. He will have to stay in Mumbai for a month and report to the investigating officer. My client was granted surety bail,” Gokhale said.

The court will decide on the bail pleas of the two other accused Akash Suyal (19), an HSC student, and Jaishnav Kakkar (20), a BCom student, after some days as they have tested positive for Covid-19. Advocates Shyam Rishi Pathak and Rahul Yadav argued for the two accused. Pathak said, “The court will decide on our bail pleas after my clients recover from Covid-19.”

All three accused were arrested from Haryana on January 21. The police have alleged that the three were using the account on the app under the name Kira XD, @jaishav and pradhan@haryana_alla.

Officials revealed that Suyal hails from Karnal in Haryana, while Kakkar and Parashar were arrested from their residence in Faridabad. Suyal and Kakkar had allegedly created two chat rooms on January 16 and 19 under the names ‘Muslim women are better then Hindu women’ and ‘Girls don’t have privileged to marry upper caste woman’, respectively, on an open forum and the chat room had more than 300 participants.

“Suyal and Kakkar, along with a few other participants, were using derogatory comments against the women. They also spoke about auctioning their body parts while Kakkar made violent remarks on raping women that reminds one of the Nirbhaya gang-rape incident,” an officer said.

The incident came to light when a two-minute-long video of the conversations in the chat room went viral.

An investigator said, “After the video of the chat room in which they were abusing, auctioning and making lewd comments against the women reached a 30-year-old woman, who is working with an IT firm, she approached us.”

In her statement to the police, the complainant alleged that on October 27 and November 27 in 2021, the participants of a chat room created by Parashar had abused and auctioned the complainant and her friend’s body parts.

“One of the complainant’s friends, who was also a participant of those two chat rooms, had video shot the incident and shared it with her after which she approached the authorities of Clubhouse, but she claimed that she did not get much help from them,” said DCP Rashmi Karandikar (Cyber).

After the video went viral, she approached the cyber cell unit at Bandra Kurla Complex following which an FIR was registered under sections 153 (A) (promoting enmity between two groups) 295 (A) (deliberate acts to outrage religious feelings) 354 (A) (sexual harassment), 354 (D) (stalking), 500 (defamation), 509 (insulting modesty of a woman) of the IPC and section 67 of the Information Technology Act.