AI generated imageNEW DELHI: The Gujarat high court, in its July 22 order, quashed a defamation FIR against a man accused of forwarding a fake newspaper clipping on WhatsApp, holding that merely forwarding a message without any evidence that the sender created or forged it does not amount to defamation. The court also said criminal defamation cases are generally not supposed to be investigated through an FIR.How did the case begin?According to the court order, the complainant who is a Bahujan Samaj Party member and publisher of a magazine, alleged that a fake newspaper clipping which had defamatory materials against him was being circulated on WhatsApp.The complaint stated that the complainant's brother first received the fake news clipping on WhatsApp from one accused. The following day, the complainant himself received the same clipping from a friend. He alleged that the accused persons had conspired to circulate the fake news to damage his reputation and that of his political party. Based on these allegations, an FIR was registered under Sections 469, 500, 501, 120B and 114 of the IPC.The petitioner approached the high court seeking to quash the FIR. He argued that he had neither created nor published the alleged fake newspaper clipping and had only forwarded it to another person on WhatsApp.What did the high court say?A single judge bench of Justice P. M. Raval found that the only allegation against the petitioner was that he had forwarded a photograph of a newspaper clipping to another person, who later sent it to the complainant. There was no material to show that the petitioner had prepared, forged or published the alleged fake news item."He has not indulged into circulating the said news if at all is if it is fake, coupled with the fact that the publisher and/or the editor of the said newspaper are not made accused in the impugned FIR or in the chargesheet also, who have allegedly published the alleged defamatory statement as per the complainant," the court said.Justice Raval also said that criminal defamation cases cannot normally begin with an FIR. Instead, the person claiming to be defamed must file a complaint before the appropriate magistrate."For lodging of a complaint for attracting provisions of Sections 500 and 501 of the IPC, a complaint under Section 2(d) of the Cr.P.C. is required to be lodged by the aggrieved person before the concerned jurisdictional Magistrate and that no FIR is maintainable as both these offences are non-cognizable offence," the court observed.Finding that the allegations did not make out any offence, the high court quashed the FIR and all related proceedings against the petitioner.