The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear an application alleging that Congress leader Rahul Gandhi pushed a pregnant journalist during the Opposition's march to the court on October 12, adding a new and contentious chapter to the legal fallout from the anti-CEC protests.
Senior advocate Gaurav Bhatia mentioned the application before a bench comprising Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi. The bench said the matter could be taken up on October 26 or 27.
Bhatia told the court that the application had been filed in a pending case. "A female journalist was manhandled on the court premises," he submitted, alleging that Gandhi had pushed the woman — reported to be three months pregnant — inside the Supreme Court precincts and that she had to be hospitalised.
The journalist has been identified in legal reporting as Richa Parashar. She has alleged that Gandhi grabbed and pulled her while she was attempting to cover the march, and that his security personnel pushed her, causing her to fall and sustain injuries, after which she was taken to hospital. The Congress party has denied the allegation.
The October 12 march saw Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, lead other Opposition leaders to the Supreme Court to file a petition challenging the Election Commission's Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls. The march took place amid Opposition protests seeking the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over alleged irregularities in the voter-list revision exercise.
Bhatia had first raised the issue during Thursday's hearing, urging the bench to take cognisance of media reports about the alleged incident. The Chief Justice responded that the court could not act on an oral submission. "Not taking suo motu of an oral submission. File petition, will like to examine," the CJI said, asking Bhatia to bring the matter through a formal application. The application was mentioned again on Friday, when the court agreed to list it later this month.
The allegation surfaced a day after the same bench took up several petitions filed by the Network for Women in Media, the Delhi Union of Journalists and others concerning alleged assaults on journalists — particularly women — and lawyers during the Gandhi-led march to the Supreme Court.
In that hearing, the court granted interim protection from coercive action to a woman journalist in a case filed against her by Delhi Police ACP Vivek Bhagat under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989.
That case was registered after the journalist accused Bhagat of sexual harassment during the protests against the CEC near Jantar Mantar; the officer, in turn, accused her of subjecting him to "public humiliation and casteist slurs" along with her colleagues while he was discharging his official duties.
The bench also agreed to examine allegations of sexual violence against women journalists covering the protests, and asked the Centre and others to spell out their views on framing guidelines governing how police and law-enforcement agencies interact with journalists during protests and crowd-control operations — a direction with implications far beyond this one controversy.
Friday's mentioning session also offered a glimpse of the court's crushing workload. The CJI said no additional matters would be listed after the mentions for the day. "Let me be very clear. Benches are very overburdened. Briefs have been going to all the benches since the morning itself," he said.
The October 12 march and the protests around it have already generated a cascade of legal proceedings: detentions in Delhi, the Bombay High Court challenge by actor Imran Khan against a "leave India" notice over his participation in the Mumbai solidarity protest, and now duelling allegations about the treatment of journalists on the Supreme Court's own premises.
Whether the application concerning the pregnant journalist leads to a formal notice or a fact-finding exercise will become clear when the bench takes it up on October 26 or 27. For now, the allegation remains exactly that — an allegation, denied by the Congress — but one the country's highest court has agreed it is willing to examine.
The episode has also exposed how bitterly contested the narrative around the October 12 march has become. When Bhatia first raised the matter on Thursday, he accused the Congress of "selective outrage," asking why cognisance should not be taken of the allegation against Gandhi when the court was already examining complaints about the treatment of journalists during the same march.
Accounts of the journalist's pregnancy have varied slightly — described as three months pregnant in some reports and two months in others — a discrepancy that underlines why the court will want the facts formally placed before it rather than argued through media reports.
The backdrop is the unusually direct confrontation between the Opposition and the judiciary's top office. The march to the Supreme Court was necessitated, according to reporting on the episode, by the fact that the Chief Justice had declined to meet Gandhi and Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, preferring that their challenge to the Election Commission's voter-roll revision be filed as a formal petition.
That refusal, the march, the detentions that followed in Delhi, and now the competing allegations of assaults on journalists have together turned the SIR dispute from an electoral-roll argument into a full-blown institutional standoff.
The bench has confirmed that notices have been issued in all the connected matters. When it reconvenes on the application later this month, the court will have to weigh a politically explosive allegation against one of the country's most prominent Opposition leaders — inside the Supreme Court's own precincts, no less — while simultaneously framing the broader guidelines for how police should deal with the press at protests.
Both questions go to the heart of democratic accountability, and both will be watched far beyond the courtroom.
What happens on October 26 or 27 will set the tone for how the judiciary handles allegations arising from its own doorstep — in a season when the court's corridors have become as contested as the streets outside them.
(Reporting based on The Tribune, Telegraph India, The Wire and India Legal.)