Wire team summoned for Jay Shah defamation

The Ahmedabad Metropolitan Court on Tuesday issued summons to a reporter and editors of the online news portal The Wire for the publication of an article against Jay Shah, son of BJP national president Amit Shah.

The summons was issued under Sections 500 and 114 of the IPC (punishment for defamation and abettor in defamation), as well as Section 202 of the Criminal Procedure Code.

“There is a prima facie case of defamation and our contention before the court was that the article was published with the intent and knowledge to defame and that it was not published in good faith. There was an ulterior motive in publishing the article and the timing was deliberate to make it an issue for the elections,” S V Raju, lawyer for Jay Shah, told DH.

He also told the court that the reply by Jay Shah had not been considered while publishing the article.

The Wire had published an article, ‘The Golden Touch of Jay Amit Shah’, written by Rohini Singh, which read that the turnover of the BJP president’s son’s company had risen 16,000 times within a year of Narendra Modi becoming prime minister in 2014.

The article went on to say that the revenue of Jay’s company in this period had jumped from Rs 50,000 to over Rs 80 crore.

Jay had approached the Metrpolitan court on October 9 to file a defamation case against seven entities, including Rohini Singh, editors Siddharth Vardarajan and M K Venu and owner of The Wire, the Federation for Independent Journalists, for publishing a “defamatory” article against him on October 8.

Jay and his lawyers, who were not present at the last hearing on October 11, on Tuesday presented themselves before the court to argue the case. Two witnesses, Jaimin Shah and Rajiv Shah, were also present during the hearing.

After Jay verified his complaint, the two witnesses testified before the court about the article being defamatory in nature.

DH News Service