[Hijab Verdict] Person accused of threatening Karnataka High Court judges moves Supreme Court for quashing FIR

A Chennai resident has moved the Supreme Court seeking quashing of the case registered against him in Karnataka for allegedly threatening the judges of the Karnataka High Court who had delivered the Hijab verdict [Rahamathulla v. State of Tamil Nadu and ors.]..The petitioner Rahamathulla prayed that in the alternative, the first information report (FIR) registered against him in Karnataka be transferred from Karnataka to Madurai Police Station in Tamil Nadu (TN) since another FIR in relation to the same issue has already been registered in TN.When the plea came up for hearing on Wednesday, a bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Bela M Trivedi issued notice to the State Governments of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka..The petitioner addressed a small gathering of the general public at Goripalyam, Madurai, Tamil Nadu. In the said address, the petitioner was accused of making an inflammatory speech and consequently, an FIR was registered against him (first FIR) in Madurai, Tamil Nadu on March 18, 2022. He was, then, arrested on March 19 and is in custody till date. .Thereafter, a second FIR was filed against him at Vidhan Saudha Police Station in Karnataka for offences under Sections 506(1) (Punishment for criminal intimidation), 505(1)(c), 505(1)(b), 505(2) (Statements conducing to public mischief), 153A (promoting enmity between different groups on the ground of religion), 109 (punishment for abatement), and 504 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace) of the Indian Penal CodeThe petitioner has approached the Supreme Court seeking quashing of the second FIR filed in Karnataka.The plea filed through advocate A Lakshminarayanan raised the following grounds:(i) The second FIR has same facts as the first FIR and therefore, not maintainable as parallel investigations on the same facts cannot be allowed. In this regard, the plea placed reliance on the judgments in TT Anthony v. State of Kerala and Arnab Goswami v. Union of India.(ii) Petitioner's fundamental right under Article 21 is violated. "Two parallel investigations being undertaken in two different jurisdictions by two different investigating agencies in regard to the same cause of action is violative of petitioner's right to fair investigation," the plea contended.(iii) Petitioner would not be in a position to approach different courts in different jurisdictions and there might be conflicting orders..The Hijab verdict was delivered by the Karnataka High Court on March 15, 2022 by a bench of the Karnataka High Court comprising Chief Justice Rituraj Awasthi and Justices Krishna S Dixit and JM Khazi. The High Court had held that Hijab is not an essential religious practice (ERP) of Islam and, thereby, upheld the power given by the State government to colleges to ban wearing of hijab in college campus