Aadhav Arjuna of TVK ‘absconded’ after Karur stampede, cybercrime police tell Madras High Court

Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) leader Aadhav Arjuna “absconded” immediately after the Karur stampede that claimed 41 lives and then posted an inflammatory tweet insinuating a revolt against the Tamil Nadu government by the youngsters and Gen Z as had happened in Sri Lanka and Nepal, the Chennai cybercrime police told the Madras High Court on Wednesday.

Appearing before Justice A.D. Jagadish Chandira, senior counsel N.R. Elango, representing the prosecution, urged the judge to not go by the arguments of senior counsel Abhishek Manu Singhvi who had contended that there was no mens rea on the part of Mr. Arjuna to incite a revolt and hence the First Information Report (FIR) registered against him must be quashed.

Mr. Elango requested the court to take into consideration, the circumstances in which the tweet was posted on X platform. “On September 27, there was a stampede at a political campaign in which this petitioner took an active participation. He absconded. Did not take responsibility. He vanished. Thereafter, he surfaced on X on the midnight of September 29,” the senior counsel said and read out the Tamil tweet.

“The entire State was boiling with great sorrow that night. The honourable President of India, the Prime Minister and everybody was worried about the stampede but this petitioner absconded after the stampede for which he was responsible and posted this tweet,” the senior counsel said and claimed that the editing/deleting of the tweet would not absolve him of the need to face prosecution.

When the judge wanted to know whether Mr. Arjuna concedes to have posted the allegedly insinuating tweet, Mr. Singhvi replied that the petitioner did post the tweet at 11:28 pm on September 29 but edited it within a few minutes by removing the references to Nepal and Sri Lanka and thereafter, finally deleted the entire tweet at 12:02 am on September 30. So, the tweet was available only for 30 mintues, he said.

However, Mr. Elango brought it to the notice of the court that the tweet had attracted 102K views within those 30 minutes. “Deletion will not absolve him from the offence,” the senior counsel said and read out Justice N. Anand Venkatesh’s 2023 judgement refusing to quash a FIR registered against actor S.Ve. Shekher even for having shared a derogatory post, written by someone else, on his Facebook page.

“The fact remains that more than one lakh people had viewed the present petitioner’s tweet. Only because this FIR was registered on September 30 itself, everything was prevented. Otherwise, the consequences could not have been stopped. The prompt registration of the FIR against the petitioner stopped the consequences,” the senior counsel said and insisted that the police must be allowed to investigate the case.

He also said, the investigation was in the nascent stage at present and that the police were dutybound to conduct a full fledged probe in such cases. Since Mr. Elango could not wind up his arguments before the end of the day, the judge adjourned the hearing on the FIR quash plea to Friday and directed the police to not file the final report, before the jurisdictional judicial magistrate, till then.’