NEW DELHI: Republic TV editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami’s legal nightmares show no signs of abating. He has been at loggerheads with police officials and the government of Maharashtra for a while now. Currently, Goswami is embroiled in two different cases — the TRP manipulation scam, and abetment to suicide case of interior designer Anvay Naik and his mother Kumud Naik. The industry has witnessed high voltage drama for the last two months with a litany of FIRs, arrests, lawsuits, hearings, and mud-slinging.
In the latest development, Goswami has filed an interim application before Bombay high court (HC), seeking directions to be issued to the chief judicial magistrate at Alibaug to not take cognisance of the chargesheet filed by the Raigad police in the abetment case. He has petitioned for a stay on all further proceedings, including the investigation in relation to the chargesheet filed.
For the record, last week, on 5 December, Raigad police filed a 1,916-page-long chargesheet before the Alibaug court implicating Goswami and two other accused in the same case. The chargesheet includes evidence from 65 witnesses. Media reports said that police has also submitted the forensic reports that have matched the handwriting in the suicide note, claiming it was not written under any pressure.
Goswami’s application seeks quashing of the FIR against him in the case and he has moved the court for an early listing of the plea and the interim applications filed in it.
It must be noted that he has also filed an application — a day before the filing of the chargesheet — with the Bombay HC seeking a stay on the filing of the chargesheet, and on any further probe into the abetment of the suicide case. In his plea, Goswami has also sought the transfer of the case to the central bureau of investigation (CBI) or any other independent investigating agency outside the purview of Maharashtra government.
In the latest application, he has claimed that despite a pending application by him, the Raigad police went ahead and filed a chargesheet without giving any notice to him or giving him a copy of the same.
Goswami’s lawyers argued that the filing of the chargesheet is a “complete subversion of due process given that it comes within hours of a political instruction being declared publicly by the home minister of Maharashtra, Anil Deshmukh.”
They further pointed that the Raigad police acted out of pure malice and malafide intent by filing the chargesheet against him so as to render his earlier application moot.
Goswami has submitted that the observations made by the Supreme Court in the judgment of 27 November “upholding due process and personal liberty, fell on deaf ears of the machinery in state of Maharashtra and it is proof of the desperate predetermined conspiracy in operation against him.”
He concluded his plea by submitting that “the filing of a malicious chargesheet in the present matter pending the hearing of his plea is aiding the instrumentality of the state which is being weaponised for using the force of criminal law against him.”
For the record, Goswami and the other accused were arrested by the Raigad police earlier in November and were remanded to judicial custody for 14 days. After the Bombay HC refused bail, the supreme court granted him interim release pending the disposal of the proceedings before the high court and for a period of four weeks from the date of the judgment of the HC.
