Supreme Court quashes all FIRs against Samay Raina over insensitive remarks on India's Got Latent

Nearly a year after a single episode triggered a wave of legal trouble, comedian Samay Raina has emerged with a clean slate. The Supreme Court on Friday quashed all criminal cases filed against him and four others over remarks made about persons with disabilities, closing out a controversy that began with an episode of India's Got Latent.

From reprimand to relief

The case had followed a familiar arc: sharp judicial criticism, followed by court-ordered corrective action, and now, closure. Earlier in the proceedings, the court had reprimanded Raina over the offensive jokes and directed him to organise awareness programmes and raise funds for persons with disabilities as a condition of moving forward.

That compliance is what ultimately turned the tide. A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant, Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice JV Mohana acknowledged on Friday that Raina and the other accused had followed through on the court's directions, and used that compliance as grounds to quash every case against them, according to NDTV.

The road to this outcome wasn't entirely smooth. At an earlier hearing, the same bench had slapped a Rs 3 lakh cost on Raina and the four others, accusing them of stalling on the undertakings they'd given the court to make amends.

The court's tone shifts

By Friday, the bench's posture had visibly softened. The judges credited Raina and his co-accused for organising shows benefiting persons with disabilities, framing it as evidence that genuine effort tends to produce genuine results. As the bench put it, "If they have started working in positive direction, there will be positive output." With that, the criminal cases tied to the disability remarks were formally quashed.

How it started

The controversy traces back to a petition filed by the Cure SMA India Foundation, which accused Raina of making insensitive comments about the high cost of treating Spinal Muscular Atrophy and of mocking a person living with the condition. The petition specifically named jokes made during the show, hosted by Raina, and implicated four other social media personalities: Vipun Goyal, Balraj Paramjeet Singh Ghai, Sonali Thakkar and Nishant Jagdish Tanwar.

The episode at the centre of it all was recorded in November, after which Raina and his fellow comics found themselves facing multiple cases over allegations of obscene and insensitive content.