Vivek Agnihotri Filed Unconditional Apology Before Delhi HC for Calling Justice Muralidhar Biased

The Delhi High Court, on December 6, asked filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri "to remain present in court on the next date of hearing" in a matter concerning the latter's tweet against former high court judge Justice S Muralidhar.

The tweet incident happened in October 2018 after a division bench led by Justice S Muralidhar, a Delhi high court judge then, disallowed the house arrest of Gautam Navlakha in the Bhima Koregaon case. Agnihotri and a few others (Anand Ranganathan and Swarajya Magazine) had tweeted Justice Muralidhar was biased in his judgement. After that, a suo moto criminal contempt case was filed against several people for their tweets.

In his filings in the court on Tuesday, Agnihotri submitted an "unconditional apology" for his tweets before a division bench of Justice Siddharth Mridul and Justice Talwant Singh. However, the high court said, "We only require your presence."

Moreover, senior advocate Arvind Nigam, the amicus curiae in the matter, further informed the high court that Agnihotri's affidavit does not match the affidavit submitted by the social media platform Twitter.

"He (Agnihotri) says he took down the tweets. Twitter says they took them down. What he asserted is contrary to what Twitter has said," Nigam said. Earlier, Twitter had filed an affidavit claiming that the platform had deleted Agnihotri's tweets following a high court order on October 29, 2018.

While Agnihotri initially appeared in person, he has not attended any hearing since 2018. In that context, the high court asked Agnihotri's lawyer to ask him to remain present in court as he is the alleged contemnor.

An application has also been filed along with the unconditional apology by Agnihotri "to recall the order of the ex-parte hearing, seeking permission to participate in the proceedings."

While the high court allowed the application, he has been asked "to remain present in court on the next date of hearing in March 2023."