Himachal Pradesh Police have registered a First Information Report against BJP Member of Parliament Kangana Ranaut in Shimla over a set of social media posts concerning the Gandhi family. The FIR was registered on Friday, November 13, on the complaint of retired Captain Atul Sharma, a resident of Shimla, who has argued that the posts are inflammatory and carry misleading information.
The case rests on posts shared on November 10 from Ranaut's verified social media account. According to the complaint, the posts allegedly insinuate about the deaths of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her sons, Sanjay Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. The posts also refer to Sonia Gandhi as a "mysterious foreign national" and allegedly suggest that she entered the family before those deaths, enabling her rise within it. A further claim attributed to the posts says Maneka Gandhi was "thrown out" of the family residence. These are the specific statements the complainant has put before the police, and the inquiry will test them against the complaint.
The FIR has been registered under three sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, including Section 196(1)(b), which deals with promoting enmity between groups. Captain Sharma's case is that the content goes beyond political criticism into what he describes as calculated provocation, and that it could spark hostility and enmity between groups. He has also said the posts contain information that is misleading, a point that the police will need to examine before any conclusion is drawn.
The dispute began earlier in the week, when Ranaut questioned the timing of Sonia Gandhi's acquisition of Indian citizenship in 1983. She made those claims in an Instagram Story. The posts that form the basis of the FIR, shared on November 10 from her verified account, are a separate set of statements about the Gandhi family's history and personal relationships, and the complaint treats them as distinct from the citizenship remark.
The episode sits within a long-running contest between the BJP and the Congress over the Gandhi family, which has been a recurring theme in national politics for decades. Criticism of the family's leadership is a standard feature of that contest, and the complainant's distinction between criticism and provocation is at the centre of the legal question now before the police. The case also places a sitting parliamentarian's social media output under scrutiny in a state capital, Shimla, rather than in New Delhi.
Police have not reported any charges or findings so far, and the investigation is continuing. No formal response from Ranaut to the FIR has been reported in the material available at the time of writing. The next steps will depend on what the inquiry establishes about the content of the posts, the context in which they were shared, and whether the complaint's allegations of misleading information and enmity can be substantiated.
Source: socialnews.xyz
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