Do we like Samay Raina?
Our score: 5 out of 10. Real good and real stains sit side by side, and nothing found points to a campaign against any group, so it lands in the middle.
Samay Raina is the comic who turned chess streaming into a fanbase and then a talent show into a national stoush. Long before the trouble, he was running charity chess streams. ChessBase reported at least six of them in 2020 raised about Rs 25 lakh for causes like Delhi's waste pickers and cyclone relief.
The first big blow-up came in early 2025, over remarks on his show India's Got Latent. He went before Maharashtra Cyber in March 2025 and told police he felt “deep regret for what I said”, adding that he had no intention of saying it. He took the episodes down and has not, as far as the sources we read show, been convicted of anything.
The longer-running fight was over jokes about people with disabilities. A complaint from the Cure SMA Foundation alleged the remarks mocked people with spinal muscular atrophy, and the Supreme Court had him and four other comedians promise to make amends. On 14 July 2026 the same bench said he had “taken the Court for a ride” over unmet undertakings and ordered Rs 3 lakh in costs.
Then the turnaround. By 14 August the court noted several efforts at making amends, including a chess tournament for specially abled people in March 2026 and donations, and quashed the FIRs. He had also apologised publicly on his birthday in October 2025, on behalf of himself and four co-comedians, saying they would be more mindful. A separate, broader case on protecting disabled people from online humiliation is still before the court.
On the harm check, our searches turned up nothing from him about trans people, vaccines or the climate, and that is honestly the limit of what we found. The stain is the disability jokes and the way he handled the court's orders. Where he went from there, apology plus action, counts for something, but it took a rebuke to get there.
The newest row is Season 2. In a rapid-fire exchange, Raina mocked fellow comic Sharon Verma's Bihari background, and she answered with a joke about him being Kashmiri that some viewers read as a nod to the Kashmiri Pandit exodus. BJP MLA Ram Kadam criticised it, and the J&K Peace Forum said “Bihar is not an insult.” Others saw plain roast banter, and Republic reports no direct statement from Raina on it.