The Delhi High Court on Thursday came down on freelance journalist Saket Gokhale over his tweets questioning the source of income of Union Minister Hardeep Puri’s wife and former Indian diplomat Lakshmi Puri to buy a house in Geneva in 2006.
“You [Mr. Gokhale] are a citizen does not mean you can damage the reputation of someone else. Reputation has been held to be a fundamental right. Before you throw mud at someone, you have to first do an entire due diligence exercise,” Justice C. Hari Shankar remarked.
Mr. Gohkale, however, declined to take down his tweets on being asked by the judge if he was willing to do so without the court passing any order.
The High Court was hearing a defamation suit filed by Ms. Puri against Mr. Gohkale for his series of tweets raising questions about how she could have bought a house for 1.6 million Swiss Francs in Geneva in 2006 with her then income.
Ms. Puri has claimed that the tweets are “maliciously motivated, laced with canards and entail deliberate twisting of facts in order to cause reputational damage and irrevocable harm”.
She said, “In order to substantiate his allegations, defendant [Mr. Gokhale] has resorted to fudging and manipulation of the information related to sources of incomes of the Plaintiff [Ms. Puri] and her husband by selectively taking details from the affidavit filed by the Plaintiff's husband in 2018 for filing his nomination for Rajya Sabha and twisting it in a mala fide manner for a wrong and per se defamatory presentation/interpretation.”
Senior advocate Maninder Singh, representing Ms. Puri, said, “It is the requirement of basic civility that if you’re going to write about me, ask me first what my stand is.”
Ms. Puri said she served as the Director of the Trade Division of UNCTAD between 2002-2009. In 2005, she was paid in Swiss Francs equivalent to $2,12,149 per annum.
Subsequently, she served as the Assistant Secretary General (ASG) at the United Nations in New York from 2011 to 2018, where she was paid in U.S. dollars over $2,50,000.
She was on leave from 2002 to 2011 from the government of India. She took voluntary retirement from the Indian Foreign Service in March 2011.
During the hearing, the High Court asked, “Did you [Mr. Gokhale] go to any governmental authority before you put this on Twitter?”
Advocate Sarim Naved replied Mr. Gokhale had tagged the Finance Minister on Twitter along with his tweets.
The court asked “whether the law permitted any citizen who had any grievance against a retired public servant or against a person standing for election, regarding any declaration or affidavit made by such persons, to make allegation on social media platforms without in the first instance seeking any clarification either from the said person or from any competent public authority”.
“It is my responsibility to tell the voters. Informing the public about the affidavit is no crime under the law. I am not aware of any law which says that I have to necessarily enquire from them before making a statement. It may be a rule of good caution,” Mr. Naved said.
“All I have done here is, I [Gokhale] have stated that the declared sources of income and the assets don’t match,” Mr. Naved said.
The court said it will pronounce its judgment on the suit on Tuesday next week.
Published - July 08, 2021 04:38 pm IST
