Kolkata: The Calcutta High Court has held that the requirement of “public view” under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, can extend to the digital sphere, observing that casteist abuse posted on social media may attract the law’s provisions.
A single bench of Justice Uday Kumar said the concept of “public view” under Sections 3(1)(r) and 3(1)(s) of the Act “transcends physical space into the digital domain”.
The observations came while hearing a petition challenging the rejection of a complaint concerning alleged casteist and offensive remarks posted on Facebook.
The complainant, a member of a Scheduled Caste, alleged that two persons belonging to general caste communities had posted “foul, unparliamentary, and casteist expletives” targeting his caste identity, religion, deity and family.
The police subsequently submitted a “Final Report True, No Clue”, stating that efforts to obtain the relevant user details from Facebook through the Cyber Police Station in Kolkata had not yielded results.
The complainant challenged the closure before the Special Court at Alipore. However, the Special Court rejected the petition, also taking note of the fact that chargesheets had been filed in three other cases instituted by the complainant.
The High Court set aside that order, holding that each alleged criminal transaction has to be assessed independently on the basis of its own facts and evidence. It described the Special Court’s reasoning as contrary to basic principles of criminal adjudication.
The court also questioned the conclusion that the case had yielded “no clue” merely because the local cyber inquiry had not obtained the required information. It noted that screenshots had been seized and statements recorded during the investigation.
The investigating agency, the court said, should consider specialised cyber-forensic measures, including State CID assistance and IP-log tracking, before concluding that no clue was available.
What the SC/ST Act says
Sections 3(1)(r) and 3(1)(s) of the SC/ST Act criminalise intentionally insulting, intimidating or abusing a member of an SC or ST community on the basis of caste, including by caste name, when the act occurs in a place “within public view”.
Courts have traditionally examined whether members of the public were present and could witness or hear the alleged conduct.
In Hitesh Verma v. State of Uttarakhand (2020), the Supreme Court held that “public view” refers to circumstances in which members of the public can witness or hear the alleged utterance. It also clarified that an incident occurring within a private space, where members of the public are not present, would not automatically satisfy the requirement.
More recently, in Ramkrishna Chauhan v. State of Uttar Pradesh, the Supreme Court reiterated that the circumstances surrounding an alleged utterance must be examined to determine whether the statutory requirement of public view is met.
The Calcutta High Court’s ruling addresses how that requirement may apply when the alleged casteist content is published online.
The court’s interpretation is also consistent with an earlier 2022 Kerala High Court ruling in Sooraj V. Sukumar v. State of Kerala, which observed that legislation must be interpreted in the context of technological changes.
The Kerala High Court had noted that social media content can potentially be accessed by members of the public beyond the physical location of the person who originally posted it, and held that a restrictive interpretation of “public view” could undermine the application of the SC/ST Act in the digital era.
The rulings, however, do not mean that every caste-related statement posted online automatically constitutes an offence under the SC/ST Act. The statutory conditions, including the nature and intention of the alleged insult and the circumstances in which it was made available to the public, continue to require judicial examination.
