The High Court has directed filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri to remain present in the court on the next date of hearing in the matter of his remarks against a High Court judge. At the same time, Agnihotri tendered an unconditional apology to the court for his tweet. However, the High Court said that his presence is required. The case pertains to tweets against the then High Court Justice S Muralidhar.

“We are asking him (Agnihotri) to remain present because he is the alleged contemnor. Does he have any difficulty to appear before this court? He has to be present and show remorse in person. Does he have any difficulty if he has to express remorse in person? The remorse cannot always be expressed by way of an affidavit,” the bench told Agnihotri’s lawyer.

The tweet incident took place in October 2018 when a division bench led by High Court Justice S Muralidhar quashed the house arrest of Gautam Navlakha in the Bhima Koregaon case. Agnihotri and some others (Anand Ranganathan and Swarajya Patrika) tweeted that Justice Muralidhar was biased in his judgment. Thereafter, criminal contempt cases were registered against several people for their tweets.

Vivek tendered an unconditional apology through his lawyer on Tuesday before a division bench of Justice Siddharth Mridul and Justice Talwant Singh. Further, senior advocate Arvind Nigam, amicus curiae in the matter, informed the High Court that Agnihotri’s affidavit did not match the affidavit submitted by the social media platform Twitter.

Agnihotri’s lawyer submitted that the filmmaker offered an unconditional apology in an affidavit in which he said that he himself had deleted his tweets against the judge. On the other hand, the court was informed that the submission was wrong. It was in fact, Twitter who deleted the tweets.