A Bengaluru civil court on Tuesday issued an ad-interim ex-parte temporary injunction restraining further circulation of two videos telecast on two private YouTube channels making allegedly defamatory remarks against former Chief Minister Siddaramaiah.
The interim order restrains 42 media houses, including newspapers, television channels, digital platforms like YouTube, Yahoo, Google and Facebook, from disseminating the impugned videos, their captions, clips, extracts, or substantially identical versions through any medium.
B. Pushpanjali, judge of the 19th additional city civil and sessions court, Bengaluru, passed the interim order on a suit filed by Mr. Siddaramaiah.
Additionally, the court directed YouTube, Yahoo, Google and Facebook, to forthwith disable access to and block the specified URLs of the two videos telecast on the YouTube channels on September 27, 2026, with title “Karnataka Honey Trap Nexus Part-1”, and October 2, 2026 with the title “Live: Biggest CD Blast in Karnataka Politics?”.
In the suit, Mr. Siddaramaiah categorically denied all the allegations made in the two videos. In one of the videos, a woman narrates a 2011 incident, allegedly when she was 14 and links it to him in a conversation with two men, “the recording of which was in a manner intended to resemble a clandestine or hidden-camera recording,” it has been stated in the suit.
The caption, it further says, “is deliberately framed to place the plaintiff at the centre of a sensational political and sexual narrative,” sans any material.
It has been pointed out in the suit that the caption to the video links the alleged recording of conversation as a reason for him to demit the office of Chief Minister, alleged blackmail, an alleged honey-trap network, the present Chief Minister, statements of other political leaders, the Congress High Command, and Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi.
“...The attempt to retrospectively connect a political transition with an alleged secretly recorded conversation is false, baseless and designed to injure Mr. Siddaramaiah’s reputation and political standing,” it has been claimed in the suit.
Since Mr. Siddaramaiah has challenged the authenticity, credibility, intent of the videos, the court observed that permitting their circulation at this stage could seriously harm his dignity, reputation and privacy. It noted that if media houses are not restrained from broadcasting or sharing the videos or their clips, the resulting damage would be irreparable.
Published - October 13, 2026 08:47 pm IST