Gujarat HC Refuses To Quash Defamation Case Filed By Jay Shah Against Left-Wing Portal The Wire

The Gujarat High Court has rejected the petition of online news portal The Wire demanding quashing of the Rs 100 crore civil suit and related criminal defamation case filed in a lower court by Bharatiya Janata Party President Amit Shah’s son Jay Shah over an article published by the left-wing website in October 2017.

On 29 November, a bench of the High Court had also rejected a petition of the news portal challenging a gag order passed by the lower court in the defamation case on 12 October.

The ex-parte injunction against the news portal by the lower court prohibited it from publishing, broadcasting or printing “in any manner” programmes in any language on the basis of the article published by the website about Jay Shah “directly or indirectly” till the defamation suit has been disposed of.

Jay Shah had filed a civil defamation case against the the reporter, editors and the company over the article ‘The Golden Touch of Jay Amit Shah’, which claimed that his firm’s turnover rose 16,000 times (from Rs 50000 to Rs 80 crores) in a few months time after the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance came to power.

He also filed a criminal defamation suit against the author of the article Rohini Singh, founding editors of the news portal Siddharth Varadarajan, Siddharth Bhatia and M K Venu, managing editor Monobina Gupta, public editor Pamela Philipose and the Foundation for Independent Journalism.

In his suit, he termed the article as “scandalous, frivolous, misleading, derogatory, libellous and consisting of several defamatory statements.”

This article was originally published on DeshGujarat and has been republished here with permission.