Ahmedabad court issues summon against 'The Wire' team in Jay Shah defamation case

The Ahmedabad Metropolitan Court on Tuesday issued summons against all the accused in a defamation case, including the reporter and editors of online news portal 'The Wire', for publication of an article against Jay Shah, son of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Amit Shah.

The summons has been issued under Section 500 and 114 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) (punishment for defamation and abettor in defamation) as well as Section 202 of the Criminal Procedure Code.

Lawyer for Jay Shah, S.V. Raju said, "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."

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 BJP president Amit Shah's son Jay's company had risen 16,000 times within a year of Narendra Modi becoming the Prime Minister of India in 2014.

The article went on to make a claim that the revenue of Jay's company during the same time had jumped from Rs. 50,000 to over Rs. 80 crore.

Jay Shah had accordingly approached the Metropolitan court on October 9 to file a defamation case against seven entities, including Rohini Singh, author of the 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 on October 8.

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

After Jay Shah verified his complaint, two of his witnesses testified before the court about the article being defamatory in nature. Jaimin Shah stated that he had received a weblink of the article from his friend and after going through the article, he felt that it was harmful to the reputation of Jay.

Rajiv Shah, on his part, stated that he had received the article link on his mobile and on going through it, he too felt that it could harm Jay's reputation, whom he described as a 'simple' and 'man of repute' in the society.

The court has now posted the next hearing in the case for November 13.