Amit Shah’s son sues website for defamation

Amit Shah at the BJP office in New Delhi on Monday. Prem Nath Pandey

BJP president Amit Shah’s son Jay on Monday filed a criminal defamation case in a metropolitan court in Ahmedabad against The Wire a day after the website published a report stating that his company’s turnover grew exponentially after 2014. In the complaint, Jay has appealed for an inquiry to be conducted into the case. The court will hear the matter on October 11.

The application was filed through senior lawyer S V Raju against the reporter, Rohini Singh; founding editors of the website Siddharth Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia and M K Venu; managing editor Monobina Gupta; public editor Pamela Philipose; and the Foundation for Independent Journalism, the non-profit that publishes The Wire.
The case was filed under IPC Sections 500 (defamation), 109 (abetment), 39 (voluntarily cause grievous hurt), and 120B (criminal conspiracy).

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The application says that the complainant, Jay, is “a young, independent and education entrepreneur holding a degree of Bachelor of Technology from the reputed Nirma University at Gujarat. The complainant enjoys excellent reputation in society in general and the business community in particular, being a self-made and honest businessman.”

Jay has accused The Wire of having “tampered with critical evidence” by changing (updating) the original version of the article, and having “caused a fabricated reworded and edited version of the defamatory article to be published in place of the original version of the defamatory article”.

The application claims that the reporter did not give Jay enough time to respond to the questions before putting it online. “The accused purposely and malafidely addressed a questionnaire to the complainant at around 1 am on Friday, the 6th of October 2017 and practically no time was given to the complainant and he was asked to respond by 6 pm on the same day.”

It says, “the email with the said questionnaire was sent from an unknown email address and was addressed with a generic subject line ‘Questions’, leading to a strong possibility of the email actually getting delivered to the spam folder and/or being missed due to the generic subject line”. It says that no further enquiry was conducted by the respondent accused after the response.

Jay complains that the article refers to profit/loss for 2012-13, 2013-14 and 2014-15 fiscals but that for 2015-16 is deliberately “not highlighted correspondingly”. That, Jay complains, is because the “accused [The Wire and others] were aware that the complainant suffered a loss…to the tune of approximately Rs 1.5 crore, and since the same would not suit the conspiracy of the accused”.

The application says “only the increase in turnover in FY 2015-16 is correspondingly shown to make it a spicy and selling story at the cost of the reputation of the complainant”.

It also says that “even before the article starts, an unconnected photograph of the marriage reception of the complainant [Jay] with the Prime Minister and Amit Shah (father of the complainant) is published along with the complainant in a crude and malafide attempt highlighting the pre-planned conspiracy of the accused to defame the complainant, as it is evident from the reading of the article and also what is stated hereinafter.”