Mumbai court bars influencer from posting about Shilpa Shetty, Raj Kundra

MUMBAI: Three-and-a-half lakh likes bought a Mumbai influencer an interim injunction, a court-ordered content purge and a return date in August. Shamita Yadav, who runs an Instagram account called “the.ranting.gola,” has been directed by a Mumbai city civil court to delete two reels targeting Shilpa Shetty and Raj Kundra, and barred from posting anything similar until the case is next heard on 21 August. It is a small order in a niche defamation suit, and yet it captures rather neatly how Indian celebrities have worked out that the fastest route to getting content pulled from the internet no longer runs through Meta’s trust-and-safety team. It runs through a civil courtroom.

The underlying suit, filed in April, is straightforward enough on paper. Shetty and Kundra allege that Yadav’s February reels falsely portrayed them as criminals, implied Kundra targets minors and accused Shetty of stoking communal discord, claims serious enough, if untrue, to justify the Rs 15 crore in damages the couple is seeking. Additional Sessions Judge SM Bukke’s interim order, issued on 17 July, restrains Yadav and her “agents and representatives” from publishing anything defamatory about the plaintiffs across any electronic medium, and orders the offending content deleted outright. None of this is unusual as far as defamation law goes; what is unusual is how well-worn this particular legal path has become for Indian celebrities dealing with viral criticism.

The suit leans explicitly on precedent that has been building for several years now: an ex parte injunction from a Bengaluru court in February protecting Shetty’s name, image and persona from unauthorised use, and earlier Bombay High Court orders doing much the same. Personality rights litigation, once a fairly exotic corner of Indian law reserved for the likes of Amitabh Bachchan, has become a standard weapon in any well-resourced celebrity’s toolkit against viral criticism, real or invented. Add the couple’s parallel case against Meta itself, plus unnamed “John Doe” defendants covering whoever else might be running similar content, and the strategy becomes clear: sue the platform, sue the creator, and sue everyone hypothetically waiting in the wings, all in one sweep.

There is a genuine grievance buried under the legal machinery. If Yadav’s reels really did accuse Kundra of targeting minors without foundation, that is not robust criticism, it is a serious and damaging fabrication, and courts exist precisely to stop that kind of thing spreading to hundreds of thousands of viewers before the facts catch up. Kundra, for what it is worth, has prior convictions in the UK relating to pornography distribution, and it is precisely that history which makes any embellished or invented claim about him so potent, and so worth pursuing through a court rather than a strongly worded statement.

But the broader pattern deserves scrutiny too. As Indian courts increasingly hand out sweeping, near-instant restraining orders against unnamed or loosely defined social media accounts, often without the accused having had much chance to mount a defence, the line between protecting a genuine reputation and simply outsourcing content moderation to a sympathetic judge gets thinner each time. A Delhi High Court order this month took down AI-generated obscene content targeting the actor Ravi Kishan, an unambiguous case of the law doing exactly what it should. Whether every subsequent case fits that same clear-cut mould is a different question, and one worth revisiting when the Mumbai court reconvenes on 21 August to check whether Yadav has actually complied.