SEDITION CASE: Ranaut sisters record statement with Mumbai police

Bollywood actress Kangana Ranaut and her sister Rangoli Chandel appeared before the Bandra Police on Friday, pursuant to a Bombay High Court order in connection with a sedition case filed against them, a lawyer said.

"As directed by the Bombay HC, they reached the Bandra Police Station at around 1 pm to record their statement," lawyer Ravish Zamindar, the advocate for the complainant Munawwarali S.A. Sayyed, said.

In November, a division bench comprising Justices S.S. Shinde and M.S. Karnik accepted advocate Rizwan Siddique's undertaking that the two Ranaut sisters would report to the Mumbai Police on January 8, in response to the summons issued to them.

The court had also barred the two sisters from making any "instigating statements" on social media platforms to the subject matter in the FIR lodged by the police, Zamindar added.

The high court orders came in a plea filed by Ranaut-Chandel seeking to quash the police FIR lodged on October 17 on the directions of Bandra Court Metropolitan Magistrate J.Y. Ghule over alleged hateful social media posts by the duo.

Following the FIR, the sisters were issued summons by the Bandra Police to appear on three different dates which they skipped on various grounds. After the third summon, they moved the Bombay HC.

"Among the charges are those under Section 124-A (sedition) of the Indian Penal Code... besides spreading communal hatred and falsehoods. The police had already recorded the statement of Sayyed in this connection in October," Zamindar said.

A Bollywood casting director and fitness trainer, Sayyed had accused Kangana and Rangoli of defaming the film industry, portraying the people working in it in bad light with allegations of nepotism, drug addiction, communal bias, and attempting to drive a wedge between artistes of different communities, calling them murderers, insulting religions, etc. on social media and through their public utterances.

In his complaint, he also charged the Ranaut sisters with seeking to create a 'Hindu-Muslim divide' through objectionable comments, citing Rangoli's remarks like "make the mullahs and secular media stand in line and shoot them down; history may call us Nazis, who cares" to prove his point. (IANS)

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