Gujarat HC refuses to quash defamation case filed by Jay Amit Shah against news portal The Wire

Ahmedabad: The Gujarat High Court today 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 here by BJP President Amit Shah’s son Jay Shah over an article published by the news portal October last year.

Earlier on November 29 another 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 October 12 .

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.

The single bench court of Justice J B Pardiwala today rejected the quashing petition of the portal.

Jay Shah had moved to a lower court here on October 9 filing Rs 100 crore 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 NDA 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 MK 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.”

DeshGujarat