The judge was scheduled to issue an order on the case on Monday. The court of the Alipore Chief Judicial Magistrate here on Monday reserved its order for September 14 in the cartoon case against Jadavpur University (JU) professor Ambikesh Mahapatra after the judge contracted Covid-19.
The court had heard the case, filed against Mahapatra under the scrapped Section 66A of the Information Technology (IT) Act for e-mailing a cartoon on Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee in 2012, on Friday.
The hearing came almost a month after the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), in a directive dated July 14, asked all states and union territories to immediately withdraw cases registered under Section 66A.
The judge was scheduled to issue an order on the case on Monday.
“We came to the court today and learnt that the chief judicial magistrate, Subrata Mukherjee, has contracted Covid-19..,” said Mahapatra’s lawyer Sanjib Ganguly.
Mahapatra was arrested for forwarding the cartoon to 65 people. The cartoon depicted Banerjee, then Railways Minister Mukul Roy, and his predecessor Dinesh Trivedi.
- The Indian Express website has been rated GREEN for its credibility and trustworthiness by Newsguard, a global service that rates news sources for their journalistic standards.
