5 min readMay 11, 2026 06:58 AM IST
First published on: May 11, 2026 at 06:13 AM IST
The Supreme Court’s (SC) judgment holding that Anurag Thakur, then a Minister of State in the Finance Ministry, and Parvesh Sahib Singh Verma, MP, did not commit a cognisable offence of hate speech in January 2020 is both surprising and deeply disappointing. We often hear that the process itself becomes the punishment. This case raises the opposite concern: Can the process be such as to lead to no punishment at all — especially when those involved occupy positions of power?
On January 30, 2020, the Election Commission debarred Thakur and Verma from campaigning for violating the MCC and the Representation of the People Act. Thakur, attacking the anti-CAA protests, described the movement as anti-national and ended with the slogan: “Desh ke gaddaron ko, goli maaro saalon ko.” Verma, referring to the same protest, warned that “they will abduct and rape your daughters”. In criminal-law terms, the speeches fall squarely within the ambit of Sections 153A, 153B, 295A and 505 of the IPC.
Yet, the Delhi Police saw no offence. They took no action on the joint complaint filed by my late colleague K M Tewari and myself — even before the EC’s order — forcing us to approach the trial court. The court sought an action taken report from the Delhi Police, which set up an inquiry under the Crime Branch. Its report was extraordinary: “The connotation/meaning of ‘gaddar’ is traitor and as such does not refer to any community. Thus, it does not amount to any cognisable offence.” Further, “qua allegations regarding Mr Verma, it is stated that the speaker has only expressed his position on the ongoing protest in Shaheen Bagh and not targeted any specific community or its members”.
This reasoning defies both logic and law. Speech cannot be divorced from context. This was a highly communalised campaign by the ruling party and its supporters against the anti-CAA protests that portrayed the protests — centred at Shaheen Bagh and led largely by Muslim women — as anti-national and the participants as traitors. In such a charged environment, the identity of the “gaddar” or those “ who will abduct and rape your daughters” was neither abstract nor ambiguous. A public call to “shoot traitors” carries a foreseeable risk of real-world harm, as subsequent violent events against protest sites demonstrated. For the police to argue that hate speech exists only when a community is explicitly named is to empty the law of meaning. It legitimises a form of coded incitement and opens up a new and dangerous path of legal sanction for the proponents of hate speech.
The trial court heard detailed submissions challenging the police report. After reserving judgment, it finally dismissed the petition on technical grounds: That prior sanction was required even to file an FIR. But if sanction was indeed the threshold issue, why not decide it at the outset? Why call for a police inquiry? Why hear arguments?
The High Court’s judgment on appeal affirmed that prior sanction was necessary and insisted that the “only” issue before it was deciding on this technical requirement. Yet it went further, recording the police conclusion that no cognisable offence was made out — something even the trial court had not done. If the matter was confined to a technical question, why enter the merits at all? Notably, while the police report found place in the judgment, the submissions challenging it did not. Such a selective process raises a further set of questions.
And then finally the SC. The appeal was first heard in April 2023. The two-member bench issued notice to the Delhi Police. In the course of the hearing, Justice K M Joseph remarked, “gaddar means traitor, I believe? Certainly here ‘goli maaro’ was not in terms of a medical prescription,” meaning thereby it is not a pill Thakur was referring to but a bullet. Justice Joseph retired in June that year, the case shifted to another bench, and the judgment came three years later.
The SC rejected as wrong the technical argument that prior sanction is required to file even an FIR. This welcome clarification untethers the hands of courts dealing with hate-speech complaints. But without following up on the notice issued earlier to the police, without hearing the petitioners’ arguments, it pronounced judgment. Thus a process which stated categorically that it was not dealing with the merits of the case at various levels concludes with a judgment precisely on the merits of the substantive issue without hearing arguments. The exoneration of Thakur and Verma is on the basis of a flawed Delhi Police report. At no stage have the arguments challenging that report been answered. No court has set out why the speeches should not be treated as hate speech. For that absence, the conclusion and the process need reconsideration.
The writer is a senior CPI(M) leader
On January 30, 2020, the Election Commission debarred Thakur and Verma from campaigning for violating the MCC and the Representation of the People Act. 
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