The Ahmedabad Metropolitan Magistrate judge on Wednesday postponed the date of hearing in a defamation case filed by Jay Amit Shah, son of BJP National president Amit Shah, against author, editors and owner of online publishing website ‘The Wire’ to October 16.
The plea to delay the hearing was made by an associate of Jay Shah’s lawyer S V Raju in the court of Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate S K Gadhavi. The associate of Jay’s lawyer pleads that as his senior was attending to another case in Gujarat High Court, he was unable to attend the court and that next date be given for hearing. The judge acceded to his request and posted the case for hearing on October 16 with a caveat that if the lawyer failed to appear before the court, there would be no more extension of the date.
Post that, the associate of Raju left the court to speak to someone over the phone. He returned to the court after 3-4 minutes to again plead with the judge to change the next date of hearing from October 16th to October 13. The judge refused to accede to the request this time and maintained that the next hearing would be held on October 16.
Two witnesses, Jaimin Shah and Rajiv Shah, were also present in the court from Jay's side for verification in the case.
Jay Shah had on Monday approached the court to file a defamation case against seven entities, including Rohini Singh, author of an article, editors Siddharth Vardarajan, M K Venu and owner of the online media outlet ‘The Wire’ Federation for Independent Journalists (FIJ), for publishing a ‘defamatory’ article against him.
The Wire had on October 8 (Sunday) published an article ‘The Golden Touch of Jay Amit Shah’ authored by Rohini Singh, stating that turnover of BJP President Amit Shah’s son Jay had increased 16,000 times over within a year of Narendra Modi becoming Prime Minister of India in 2014. The article claimed that the revenue of Jay’s company had jumped from mere Rs 50,000 to over Rs 80 crore in a single year. It went on to state that Jay’s firm, whose business was mainly stock trading, turned to windmill generation with PSU loan.
Jay, in his complaint before the court, claimed that the accused had “willfully” and “fraudulently” tampered with the evidence and that “the article is a well-thought-out, well-planned and well-executed conspiracy against the complainant and dignitaries mentioned in the article.”
Published 11 October 2017, 11:18 IST