A court in Gujarat’s Kutch district on Tuesday issued an arrest warrant against journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta in a defamation suit file...
A court in Gujarat’s Kutch district on Tuesday issued an arrest warrant against journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta in a defamation suit filed by the Adani Group. The case pertains primarily to two articles about the business conglomerate that were published first in the Economic and Political Weekly and then in The Wire.
The first article headlined “Did the Adani Group Evade Rs 1,000 Crore in Taxes?” was published in January 2017, while the second “Modi Government’s Rs 500-Crore Bonanza to the Adani Group” followed six months later in June. Guha, then the editor of EPW, had co-written the articles with other journalists.
The articles alleged that the government unduly favoured the Adani Group, helping it expand and evade taxes.
Two defamation suits
The Adani Group sent a legal notice to the publications, asking them to take down the articles, claiming they were defamatory. The EPW took them down, which led Thakurta to resign as editor.
After The Wire refused to comply with the notice, the Adani Group went to court applying for an injunction. It also filed two cases against the authors and the editors of The Wire in two different courts in Gujarat: a civil defamation suit in Bhuj and a criminal defamation case in Mundra.
In 2018, the Principal Senior Civil Judge of Bhuj turned down the injunction request in the civil...
