Punjab HC asks trial court to adjourn defamation case against Kangana Ranaut till Sept 8

|HT|

The Punjab and Haryana high court on Monday asked a trial court to adjourn proceedings in a defamation case against actor Kangana Ranaut till after September 8. The court acted on Kangana’s plea seeking quashing of defamation proceedings initiated against her in a Bathinda court over a tweet in 2021 during the farmers’ agitation against the Centre’s three farm laws.

The defamation complaint was filed by Mohinder Kaur of Bahadurgarh Jandian village in Bathinda on January 5, 2021.

“The high court has issued notice of motion on the petition for September 8. The state’s counsel accepted the notice and took time to file the reply. The high court has asked the trial court to adjourn the matter beyond the date fixed before the high court,” Kangana’s lawyer Abhinav Sood said.

The actor claims none of the accusations mentioned prima facie establish a case of defamation and the same was based on “false and baseless allegations”. The complaint has been filed with an ulterior motive and is the outcome of political vendetta, Kangana claimed, seeking quashing of the summoning order of February 22 passed by the judicial magistrate (first class), Bathinda. “The court passed the order in a mechanical manner without examining the veracity of the allegations and in the absence of a proper inquiry,” she said, adding there was no evidence on record that could substantiate allegations against her.

In her tweet, she had allegedly compared Mohinder Kaur with Shaheen Bagh dadi, an elderly woman protester at Delhi’s demonstration site against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, and had indicated that such protesters could be hired.

In her complaint, Mohinder Kaur said the actor had made “false imputations and remarks” against her in the tweet by claiming that she was the woman who was part of the Shaheen Bagh protest. “By using such remarks, the actor lowered my reputation and prestige,” Mohinder Kaur complained. Kangana’s plea says several Twitter and Facebook users posted two images of an elderly woman stating that she is 82-year-old Bilkis Bano, popularly known as Shaheen Bagh dadi. Several people on social media claimed that both the women in the photograph are the same and that Bilkis Bano was also present at the farmers’ protest. The post was merely retweeted by the petitioner and none of the remarks were made by her.

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