MR JUSTICE JOHNSON Approved Judgment Hegab v Spectator 52. Hindutva: The claimant’s case is that the Hindutva were responsible for the disturbances in Leicester, and that he was calling that out in his speech. Irrespective of the correct analysis of the underlying causes of the disturbances (which it is not necessary to address), there is a separate question as to the basis for the claimant’s attribution of responsibility to the Hindutva. 53. The claimant’s account as to his basis for attributing responsibility to the Hindutva does not withstand scrutiny. He had not been in Leicester in the days and weeks leading up to his speech. He had no first-hand knowledge of the events and was not in a position to make a direct first-hand informed assessment. He had, however, seen some material that was posted online. One online video shows a number of masked men who can be heard to chant “Jai Shree Ram.” Text that has been added to the footage says that the men were marching past a Muslim neighbourhood and that large-scale disorder had erupted. When he was shown this video in evidence, the claimant said “this was one of the most circulated videos before I went up there, which to me was decisive and the definitive interpretation for it is that this is nothing to do with… Hindu people as a whole and in fact this is violent behaviour that is linked to political ideology.” In other words, this video was an important component of the basis for the claimant’s beliefs about the involvement of the Hindutva. 54. A difficulty with that account is that this video was only posted online two days after the claimant’s speech. It cannot therefore have informed his knowledge of events at the time he gave his speech. When that was pointed out, the claimant said he did not know if this was the “exact video” that he had seen, but that he had seen material with the same elements. The claimant relied on the chants of “Jai Shree Ram” but he did not have any convincing reason for asserting that this was necessarily an indicator of the Hindutva as opposed to Hindus who do not subscribe to the Hindutva ideology. The claimant, in his oral evidence, said he had seen Hindutva flags when he was in Leicester. This was not in his witness statement. In any event, he did not profess any detailed knowledge of Hindu vexillology, and he was in no position reliably to attach particular significance to individual flags. When taken to a tweet by CVB posted in September 2023, the claimant did not know about the flag depicted in the tweet which CVB said was associated with the Hindutva (but which the organiser of the Krishna Janmashtami celebrations at which the flag was flown said was a flag of spiritual importance that was kept in temples and was not considered to be a political flag). 55. It is clear that the claimant followed CVB’s social media posts, and CVB asserted that there was Hindutva involvement. But CVB’s tweets elicited responses from the police which warned that unsourced assertions should not be taken at face value. The claimant has had sufficient academic training to know about the dangers of placing any great weight on CVB’s contested tweets. In any event, CVB also referred to groups of Hindu men (rather than simply the Hindutva). Much of the more general contemporaneous reporting also indicates that the problems arose between groups of Muslim and Hindu men. 56. Even the claimant, in his evidence, stopped short of contending that all of those who were on the streets in opposition to the Muslim men were the Hindutva. The fact is that the claimant was in no position to make a reliable assessment of the political or ideological views of each of the individual men who were involved in the disturbances. He may have believed (based on the incomplete and partial information he was accessing) that some of those involved in the disturbances were sympathetic to