High Court of Madras quashes frivolous case filed against Swami Nithyananda

24 September 2017

Chennai

The Hon'ble High Court of Madras in a hard hitting judgement quashed the case filed against Swami Nithyananda in 2010 alleging that he had cheated and had hurt religious sentiments. The Hon’ble Court slammed the “criminal proceeding manifestly instituted with malafide, maliciously instituted with an ulterior motice for wreaking vengeance on the accused and with a view to spite him due to private and personal grudge”.

The case was filed in Puducherry in Cr. No. 90/2010 on 5 March 2010 alleging hurting religious sentiments of the people and cheating by Swami Nithyananda. Right after though, on 15 June 2010, the Hon’ble High Court of Madras had given a stay on further proceeding of the case observing clearly that “it is nobody’s case that Swami Nithyananda was behind this offending telecast” thereby pointing at the fundamental question of who actually hurt the religious sentiments of and cheated the people – not Swami Nithyananda but the perpetrators of the false fabricated video – Sun TV, as was confessed by then COO of Sun TV Hansraj Saxena in public, over television channels and in sworn affidavit to the Court.

The Hon’ble High Court of Madras then went on to quash the false case on 28 February 2017 with a detailed order analysing the baselessness of the case and observing, “If the allegations made in the First Information Report as well as in the complaint are taken on their face value and accepted in its entirety, they do not prima facie constitute any offence or make out a case against the petitioner. Where a criminal proceeding is manifestly instituted with malafide and/ or where the proceeding is maliciously instituted with an ulterior motive for wreaking vengeance on the accused and with a view to spite him due to private and personal grudge, the High Court can exercise its inherent jurisdiction to prevent the abuse of process of Court.

Therefore, the criminal proceedings have to be necessarily quashed.” This ruling is yet another in a series of victories for Paramahamsa Nithyananda against whom numerous frivolous and malicious cases were filed in 2010 after a morphed video of him was released by the controversial Chennai based private TV channel, SunTV. The COO of the channel Hansraj Saxena has since confessed to the morphing of the video and he and a number of his associates including Lenin Karuppan, Aarthi Rao and Nakeeran Gopal are on trial in Chennai for Criminal Intimidation (IPC 506), Extortion (385), Cheating (420), Illegal Confinement(342) and Robbery (392). Attached is the full order. Below are some highlights of the order.