Kolkata: Casteist slurs in the ‘digital domain’ come under the penal purview, Calcutta High Court has observed, directing police to reinvestigate a Behala resident’s complaint against Facebook posts abusing him because of his caste. Police had filed a closure report in a lower court on the grounds that the social media platform did not cooperate with the investigating officers.“Under Section 3(1)(r)/(s) of SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, public view transcends physical space into the digital domain,” the single-judge bench of Justice Uday Kumar said on Sept 25. The sections criminalise intentional caste-based insults, intimidation and abuses directed at members of Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes in public view.The judge, who extended the ambit of ‘public view’ to ‘digital domain’, observed that police could not simply throw up their hands and say “no clue” just because the local anti-cybercrime cell had hit a dead end while pursuing the case with the social media platform to ascertain the user IDs of those who made the posts. The case was sent back to the lower court.The judge criticised police for filing a closure report without a cyber-forensic probe by a specialised CID unit or following the IP-log tracking protocol, and observed that the trial court’s failure to order a further probe by a senior officer amounted to a “serious miscarriage of justice”.The lower court had rejected a ‘na-raji’ (protest) petition by the complainant against the decision to close the case and accepted the ‘Final Report True, No Clue (FRT)’ report filed by police.The petitioner, from an SC community, lodged a complaint with Behala police station against two persons on Sept 21, 2022, alleging that they had posted “foul casteist expletives” on Facebook targeting his caste, religion and family.An inquiry was conducted, statements of independent witnesses were recorded and digital links and screenshots collected. But police submitted an ‘FRT’ report on Jan 20, 2023, stating that assistance was sought from Facebook through the cybercrime police station but no user details could be provided by the social media platform. The petitioner filed the ‘na-raji’ petition on Feb 14, 2023, but it was rejected on June 27.Petitioner’s counsel submitted in the high court that the inability of the anti-cybercrime cell to extract data from the platform could not be a reason for closing the case. Instead, an investigation by a specialised unit should have been ordered, the counsel contended.The state counsel defended the police’s decision, saying a proper investigation was conducted and a closure report was rightly submitted following failure to trace user ID details.“What shocks judicial conscience in the instant case is the reasoning adopted by the Special Judge (of the lower court) that because the complainant had filed three other special cases where charge sheets were submitted, the ‘Nil’ report in the present case must be accepted. Criminal jurisprudence examines every distinct criminal transaction and occurrence on its own foundational worth and evidentiary matrix,” the judge observed.
