India, Oct. 13 -- The Kerala High Court on Monday dismissed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) against the cover of Arundhati Roy's book 'Mother Mary Comes to Me,' which shows the author smoking a beedi.

While the PIL had claimed the book's cover violated the law by not carrying a statutory health warning, a division bench of Chief Justice Nitin Jamdar and Justice Basant Balaji, however, said the petitioner had failed to disclose that the publisher had, in fact, included a smoking disclaimer on the back cover.

The bench also observed that the high court was not the appropriate forum to adjudicate such issues, since under the statutory scheme under the COTPA Act, 2003, they should be decided by "expert bodies" constituted under the Act, ...