Allahabad High Court: A Division Bench of Sunita Agarwal and Saumitra Dayal Singh, JJ., declined to restrain the re-telecast of Vishnu Puran, observing that the PIL seem to be filed with mere motive of creating a controversy.
Present petition was filed to seek a direction in order to restrain the re-telecast of a few episodes of a serial ‘Vishnu Puran’ on certain channels of the national broadcaster — Door Darshan.
Petitioner has placed his strong objection towards the representation of certain characters in the above-stated serial, i.e. Lord Vishnu and a lot of other deities have been misrepresented.
“…it is undisputed that the objectionable work is basically a work of art for entertainment. It may be based on certain scriptures or ancient works and therefore it may suffer from inaccuracy and mistakes either deliberate or otherwise.”
Bench also added to its analysis in respect to the present matter that, ancient work such as the ‘Vishnu Puran’ and other texts are always open to debate and discussion resulting in multiple views arising and being discussed even at the level of religious teachers and people spiritually inclined. It is the beauty of plurality that our society practices.
Thus, Court held that it will not be proper to act on the apparent over sensitivity of the petitioner who believes in a particular line of thought and finds himself opposed to another view or thought being represented in the TV serial of which he is neither a creator nor the participant, but a mere spectator that too with an option to watch or not to watch such a show.
Hence, in the above view PIL seems to be filed merely with the motive of attracting controversy or create one. [Santosh Kumar Jaiswal v. UOI, 2020 SCC OnLine All 811 , decided on 24-06-2020]